


Stain The Water Clear

by objectlesson



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, CSA, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Dark, Dubious Consent, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Manipulation, Mental Coercion, Past Child Abuse, Pre-Series, Rape/Non-con Elements, Romance, Sexual Abuse, Trauma, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 22:32:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 19
Words: 55,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3667677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wind may come and scatter ash, but Sebastian is the fire. He will keep burning, and Ciel will continue to smolder beneath him, until kingdom come.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this story because I am endlessly fascinated by those two years between Sebastian and Ciel's initial meeting and when the Manga/Anime begins, during which a recently abused and traumatized Ciel was living with a demon as his only moral guidance and parental comfort. What happened to him during those two years?
> 
> Like most things one spends too long thinking about, it began as such and gradually morphed into other things, including a surprisingly uncynical but somewhat postmodern take on what a demon's 'love' might look like, and a long winded study on innocence and experience. I also wanted to explore the paradox of a demonic sexual coercion/corruption happening in a Victorian literary frame, so the whole thing is unflinchingly OF THE BODY in a way that I feel like I should probably warn people about. 
> 
> ALSO the most important warning label I need to slap on this sucker is that IT DOES take place directly following the creation of their contract, so Ciel is TEN YEARS OLD for much of it. Yes, I know. I highly advise taking your leave now if that's something which makes your stomach turn, because there is only more stomach turning material ahead. 
> 
> Note: ALL SEX WITH CHILDREN CIEL'S AGE IS RAPE, NON-CON, ABUSE, ETC. I do not ever ever ever ever condone this type of thing. Ciel is incapable of giving consent as an abused child, so every sex scene in any story I've ever written in this fandom is coerced and essentially non consensual. Read at your own risk knowing that just because this is a WORK OF FICTION about ANIME CHARACTERS, doesn't mean the dynamic therein is ok. 
> 
> A huge huge huge thanks to DustofWarfare, who expedited the writing and editing process of this mastodon sized work of smut with her VERY ZEALOUS support and beta work. I owe much to her and our soulless bond.

_____________________________

"Piping down the valleys wild  
Piping songs of pleasant glee  
On a cloud I saw a child.  
And he laughing said to me. 

Pipe a song about a Lamb;  
So I piped with merry chear,  
Piper pipe that song again—  
So I piped, he wept to hear.

Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe  
Sing thy songs of happy chear,  
So I sung the same again  
While he wept with joy to hear 

Piper sit thee down and write  
In a book that all may read—  
So he vanish'd from my sight.  
And I pluck'd a hollow reed. 

And I made a rural pen,  
And I stain'd the water clear,  
And I wrote my happy songs  
Every child may joy to hear"

\---Introduction to the Songs of Innocence, William Blake

 

__________________________

 

He looks like he’s made from moonlight, like his bones are hewn from cream. So small and frail and flickering against the massive storm of ink and smoke which consumes him, takes his hand between talons and draws him close, flush against metal bars.

“You’re what I called,” he says in a child’s voice, though it has been made hoarse and desperate with screaming. “Who are you? What’s your name?” 

“Whatever name you give me,” the darkness murmurs, brushing up against him with massive wings, with kisses of velvet. The child shivers, his face crumpling and scrunching in overwhelm. The darkness recedes, trembles as it constructs images of humanity within its tendrils, attempting to settle upon a form, a composite of flashing images inside this tiny boy’s mind. 

“Sebastian,” he whispers from the cage. His eyes shine with yearning, the right half-obscured with a patina of blood which seeps from the new shape carved upon it. 

The darkness, now named Sebastian, quivers into the shape of a man before it transforms completely. The claw which had been gripping the hand of his new master is but a hand, marked with the same infernal curse as the bleeding eye. It climbs, skittering long fingers up the crease of an elbow, the gentle slope of a shoulder, towards a smooth, bruised cheek. There it stays. 

\---

 

Sebastian stands amid drifts of ash like snow, and rebuilds a mansion. Using half-recalled floor plans etched into the memory of the ten year old boy at his feet, he fashions hallways and chandeliers with new human hands, he twists spiral staircases up from charred, skeletal remains. The stones assemble, and the burnt mess in their wake dissipates into the sky like it had never even been there at all. 

Beside him, the tiny Earl of Phantomhive watches, blue eyes wide and glassy and stunned. His face is a mess of smudges, coal and blood run through with pale, clean lines of dried tears, and Sebastian looks down at him as the last of the walls shudders skyward. He is such a small, tragic thing with his bloodied knees and filthy hair. Never in his centuries roaming the human realm in search of souls has Sebastian ever possessed a master so young and fragile, and he wonders how such a contract will pan out, how such an infant soul will taste. 

He drops to his knee beside his new world. “Is it to your satisfaction, young master?” He asks. 

Ciel continues to stare, the new manor reflected in two pools of shimmering, wavering blue. Sebastian very, very gently reaches up and takes the delicate chin in his palm, turns Ciel’s round face back and forth to examine. He’s quite beautiful, even scraped and bruised and tearstained like this, soft white skin beneath the dirt, lovely bones, irises the color of a summer twilight. Sebastian wants to lean in and clean him with his tongue like a cat, but he can tell that this child does not yet trust him, so instead he just wipes a smudge of ash at the corner of his lips away with a thumb. Ciel lets him, blinking before he warily regards Sebastian, asking, “How did you do it? Magic?” 

Sebastian cocks his head, hand dropping away from his smooth cheek. “What I am merely allows me to complete such tasks more efficiently than a human could,” he explains carefully. _What I am_. It is a silly way to refer to himself, but he’s spent enough time around humanity and their endless hypocrisy and blind fear to abandon caution. 

“A demon,” Ciel says in a whisper, almost to himself. He shuts his eyes resolutely, like sealing a letter off to send. A solitary tear leaks from his newly branded eye. “That’s like angel, only wicked, right?” 

Sebastian shakes his head, amused and touched. “Wickedness is something humanity invented. Demons are like angels in that we are powerful by your standards, but that might be the end of that comparison. Demons serve humans, where angels try and save them, purify them.” 

“But you saved me,” Ciel points out. 

A sensation, shocking and excruciating in its newness, clenches in Sebastian’s chest. His hand flies to his ribcage, feeling about his sternum for some type of injury, an incision. But there is nothing, just this child before him, frail and filthy and shaking. He collects himself, disturbed, but also fascinated. “It is what you ordered me to do. That is the nature of our covenant. A demon is whatever his master wants him to be, he does whatever his master wishes,” Sebastian explains, throat feeling parched by the swirls of ash still fluttering about them. He is not used to his human body, he is not used to anything yet. He clears his throat. “So the question remains. Young master, what do you desire of me?” 

Ciel appears overwhelmed by such a huge thought and stands swaying for a moment, the manor immense and towering behind him like a monument to his own new, incomprehensible power. Sebastian can sense the combined fear and intrigue coming from him in waves, the numbing realization that he can do anything, be anything, ask anything. A child rarely has the power to grant his own deepest of wishes, and the purity of that strikes something deep within Sebastian, again forcing his insides to momentarily collect in sharp, fleeting pain. _Interesting_ , he thinks, touching the ribs which protect this new and wondrous thing, his human body’s heart. 

“I want...” Ciel starts, jaw clenched and trembling between words, hands gathered into tiny white fists. “I want.” 

Sebastian reaches out and uncurls one of those fists, spreading slender and dirty fingers so that he can kiss the exposed palm in the pantomime of complete and total servitude. Ciel gasps and snatches his hand back, stunned and staring at Sebastian like something miraculous has just happened. “Anything you want, my lord,” He explains, making his lips smile an unpracticed smile that is surely hideous in its inhumanity. The Earl of Phantomhive does not bat an eye, marked or otherwise. 

“I want...to go home,” he mumbles in the smallest of voices, rubbing a running nose with the back of his hand. “And I would like something sweet. And a bath. And to be tucked in.” 

Sebastian nods. “Young master, it sounds as if you would like me to be your butler.” 

Ciel nods, visibly relieved that there is a word which encapsulates all of his seemingly limitless wants, his mundane and foolish needs. He looks as if he is close to the verge of collapse, and so Sebastian picks him up like the child he is, cradling the tiny and battered body to his chest as he begins to walk towards the manor magic built. He is surprised when Ciel wraps his arms around his neck, burying his dirty face into the skin there and inhaling a long, ragged inhalation. “I want you to protect me,” he whispers almost inaudibly. “Sebastian.” 

Sebastian slides a hand up Ciel’s back, holding him tighter, closer. Nearly tight enough to crush. “Yes, my lord,” he swears. _Interesting_ , he thinks.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am slowly reading the manga. I'm on book VI I think. Anyway, I didn't know there was a canonical tooth pulling scene when I wrote this, but I do now. Apparently that happens when Ciel is 11, my bad.

_______________

Their first months spent inside the home built by the devil pass in a struggle. The Earl of Phantomhive is often sick and volatile with trauma, and Sebastian is just beginning to again master his grasp on humanity, so together they meet and converge in a rage of salt and darkness like a hailstorm above the sea. Sebastian knows nothing of children, let alone a child with such a tremendous portion of their otherwise pure and blessed past stained black with blood. 

Sometimes it seems as if Ciel wants Sebastian to eradicate his pain. Soak up the sanguine river inside his memory with satin gloves, smooth over his past until there is nothing left, no contract, no curse, no promise. Just the manor the way it used to be, the way before it was built as he remembered it being, rather than the way it actually was. 

Of course, this is not within Sebastian’s nature, nor his interest. He needs Ciel’s soul to be anguished, he needs to cultivate his master’s darkness and hate so that it grows limbs, grows its own heart. It is the seed of obsidian imbedded in so much pale, sorrow-logged terror, and Sebastian intends to draw it out, water it, make it grow. 

There are days when Ciel decides he is afraid of his new dog, his ivory knight. He will hide beneath the sheets of his bed or inside his ebony wardrobe, gathered shivering within his arms, face wedged between his drawn knees. Sebastian is not sure what triggers these episodes, if Ciel’s wild distrust is specific to his butler, or generalized to anyone who tries to touch him, coax him from his clam-tightness. 

His eyes take on a hazy sheen when he’s in this state, like he’s trying to make out the world from behind a curtain of blood. A creature of time if nothing else, Sebastian is patient. He may not be able to empathize with humanity’s fragility but he can admire it, can gracefully and willingly accept the challenge of reassuring his master that while the rest of the world may be hateful and wicked and barbed in its darkest recesses, he is the shield. He is the solace. 

Ciel is curled defensively beneath the dining room table, shuddering with great gasping breaths, shaking like something caught in a gale. “Stay away from me,” he mumbles almost inaudibly as Sebastian peers beneath the table cloth. “How do I know I can trust you. How do I know if I can trust anyone.” 

They’re not questions, so Sebastian does not reply. Furthermore, they are true. Since the manor burnt to a husk and the Phantomhives smoldered within it, a demon has been Ciel’s only guiding light, his only oracle, his solitary access to morality. Sebastian’s own morality is a dubious thing; after all he is a beast driven by hunger only occupying a human body. He knows little of true human morality, save for what he has studied in his years spent above the underworld. He does not know how a ten-year old with a scar burnt into him as forever proof of humanity’s cruelty is supposed to judge such a thing as trust. He only knows it is his sole purpose to do anything for him, to shed any blood by this boy’s tiny hand. 

Sebastian sets the tea pot and saucer upon the table with a small clinking sound, then drops to his knees between two dining chairs. He does so silently, and Ciel does not flinch. “Young master,” he says, quiet and low, extending a gloved hand along the floor towards Ciel’s body. “I swore to protect you. You can trust that if nothing else.”

Ciel’s gaze snaps up, his cheeks red and eyes wet, though no tears have spilled. Ciel is prone to dry, wracking sobs, to hysterical fits of anger and paranoia, but he rarely, rarely cries. Sebastian waits for it when it happens, so that he can descend down in a flurry of black wings and wipe the tears away before they fall, lick his fingers once his master’s eyes have drifted closed and taste the salt-muted misery therein.The purity of youth’s emotions never fail to stun Sebastian.

“The oath of a demon,” Ciel snaps. “How virtuous.” 

Sebastian inches slightly closer, eyes cast to floor as not to frighten Ciel with the intensity of his own gaze. He has not yet learned to control the flicker of hellfire his eyes sometimes bely, and sometimes it surges forth in inopportune moments, further forcing Ciel into his shell of fear and suspicion. “Demon’s oaths are absolute, young master. You could not be in safer hands. Remember, it was humanity who killed your parents, who burnt your home. It was humanity who branded you. And it was I who took your hand and delivered you from evil.” 

Ciel blinks and swallows, a noisy infantile sound which echoes under the table. “I know,” he mumbles eventually. “And I want to trust you. And I do. But what if I’m wrong?” His words fall wet and bitter, and Sebastian wants to plunge forward into the hot damp space between them and swallow them before they touch the air, roll them around under his tongue and bite into their childish vulnerability. Ciel Phantomhive is too lovely, too wounded and broken and spiteful and scared for his ten years. Too much to take. Sebastian covers his eyes with a gloved hand, to keep the scarlet from burning them both to ash. 

“I sympathize with your plight, young master,” he says, pleased he does not sound as strangled as he feels. “The human world is a perilous one to navigate. Especially for a child.”

“Or for a demon?” Ciel asks, sniffling. Sebastian can feel himself being examined, can feel Ciel’s inquisitive gaze scanning over his own shoulders, his neck, the wing of his hair which covers his face. Then, miraculously, a small pale hand is reaching for him, trembling as it brushes the hair from his cheek and tucks it behind his ear. 

He risks a glance at the boy, who is canted forward on his knees and creeping towards him with tentative curiosity. His visible eye looks clearer, its usual fierce, sapphire blue unobscured by memory’s haze. He wants to reach out and dip his fingers into its chill. “Or a demon,” he answers. 

“So...you will never betray me?” Ciel asks, sitting back on his knees, inches from Sebastian. 

He shakes his head in response, placing a wide palm over that strange and terrible heart. “Never.” 

“Or lie to me, or hurt me?” Ciel asks as he chews on his lower lip, making it pink and wet with his teeth. 

“Again, never,” Sebastian explains. He doesn’t know why, but his chest is alive with a storm of feeling, a tight, urgent sensation expanding between his lungs like the unfurling of a tremendous wing. He wonders if his ribs will crack before he remembers that humans endure and survive emotion every day, their bodies sustain the agony time and time again. It is part of what makes them different, and interesting. 

“But you could,” Ciel reminds him, narrowing his eye warily. Then, much to Sebastian’s surprise, he reaches up to his butler’s mouth and indicates towards his sharp, pointed incisor with an index finger. “With these. Or you could rip my heart out, like those beasts you rescued me from.”

“Yes,” Sebastian admits, closing his fist around Ciel’s delicate hand and bringing it close to his lips. “I could hurt you, if you wished me to. But your order would be the only circumstance in which I would commit such an act. You are safe, as long as you want to be.” 

Ciel’s young face flushes, confused as he tries to imagine situation which would ever warrant him ordering Sebastian to hurt him. The mess of it makes Sebastian’s abdomen contract, makes his skin crawl and his eyes, inevitably, flash garnet. Ciel winces, but does not pull away. His curiosity is an indomitable thing, relentless and beautiful, and Sebastian is moved by it. “Watch,” He tells Ciel, prying one slender finger from a tight, sweat-damp fist, and extending it. 

He places the tip of Ciel’s finger upon the point of his left fang, letting him feel its slick, tapered potential. Ciel’s face, terribly soft and round, is so near him, gaze rapt and fascinated. Sebastian can see he’s holding his breath. “Does it hurt?” he asks him. 

“No. It’s wet,” Ciel observes, voice nothing more than breath.

“Now you know,” Sebastian murmurs. Then, he curls Ciel’s fingers inward towards his palm again, balling them into a small, tight fist, which he pushes gently into the slick heat of his mouth. His lips close over Ciel’s bony wrist,where they stay, tongue flicking absentmindedly at his hidden palm. 

Ciel stares at him, mouth parted, pupil blown huge and black in wonder as it locks in on Sebastian. He doesn’t know what’s happening. No one has ever touched him like this before, it’s not a touch catalogued in his memory or in his limited knowledge of what touch is, could be, means. It flickers across Sebastian’s mind that he, himself, does not know what he’s doing, only that he is proving himself, he is displaying his restraint in the only way he can imagine a ten year old child understanding it.

He releases Ciel’s hand, sucking his own spit off as his lips slide away. Ciel flexes wet fingers, examines his own skin with wide blue eyes, in search of damage, the pinprick of fangs. Of course, there is nothing. “Do you trust me now, young master?” Sebastian whispers, brushing silk-soft hair from a fevered brow so he can place a gentle kiss there. “Are you ready to come out from under here and have your afternoon tea?” 

Ciel falls towards him like a feather caught in a squall, collapsing into Sebastian with such childish certainty it aches to possess it, it aches to hold it within his arms. 

\---

Sebastian honors their covenant to the best of his ability, but there are more than a few times he unintentionally hurts the Earl of Phantomhive, temporarily obliterating the shimmering tendrils of trust beginning to stretch between them like spider’s silk. There is little he can do to help it. Humans are more fragile than he remembers, and children are among the most fragile of all humans, and then there is Ciel. 

It seems miraculous that a boy so physically weak managed to survive ten years on this savage planet to begin with, let alone months of torture, of captivity. It’s one of his many alluring paradoxes, such a small, vulnerable creature enduring such terrible pain. Sebastian finds himself wondering how much more he could take, to what ends and limits he could push him to. 

However, that’s not what he’s thinking of when he plucks the wiggling baby tooth from the sweet wet of Ciel’s mouth. When he inches his gloved fingers past soft lips, it only seems a logical thing, an act of parental care originating from necessity. He’s not anticipating the spray of blood, or Ciel to wrench away from him clutching his jaw, gaze hectic and disbelieving and betrayed. But when it happens his treacherous body reacts, stomach coiling around the glory of those blue eyes clouding in pain, the erratic twist of his tiny, rage-filled body as it rides and resists sensation. “That _hurt_ , you don’t just _pull them out_ ,” Ciel spits, hands clasped to his cheek and quivering chin. “Do not _ever_ touch me again,” he orders, voice shrill. 

Sebastian stands back, gloves spit damp and blood speckled, drinking in the spectacle of Ciel’s mistrust. He’s heaving with it, curled in his chair defensively, his animal preservation instinct projecting a wall between him and his butler. He dares Sebastian to cross it. As he narrows his eye, his tongue darting out to lick away the pinpricks of blood from his lower lip, Sebastian composes himself, brandishing the tiny milk-white tooth in his palm for Ciel to see. 

“I apologize, young master. I did not intend to cause you any pain. Though I will honor your request if you truly wish it, many of my duties as the Phantomhive butler will be rendered nearly impossible if I cannot touch you ever again,” he explains. He is both moved by and amused by the conviction Ciel can muster, all his ten-year-old certainty packed into a solitary order, a solitary moment. 

Ciel stares at his own tooth, wary of the hand it rests upon. “I don’t care,” he says coldly, still rubbing at his jaw even though the initial surge of pain must be fading, replaced with a sick, dull ache. “You’ll manage.” 

Sebastian imagines gently parting those lips with his fingers again, licking the bloody socket from which he ripped the tooth, soothing away its sting. With a mind of filth, he nods curtly. “As you wish, my lord.” 

The order lasts all of seven hours. Ciel is far too young and inept to take care of himself without Sebastian’s touch, and finally he revokes his claim, frustrated as he tries to undress himself for bed. “Fine. I take it back,” he snaps. 

Sebastian raises one elegant eyebrow from where he is standing by the door and watching Ciel’s pathetic struggle with his own buttons. “Oh?” he asks simply, taking a single step forward and placing the candle stick he had been holding upon Ciel’s desk. The flames flicker, casting the walls in a hellish orange amid a frantic mess of shadow. 

“You may touch me,” Ciel says, defeated, holding his arms out so helplessly, like a crucified straw man in a field of wheat. His unobscured eye peers from between limp wings of hair, unbrushed after his bath, since he could not even wield a comb successfully. He looks terrifically small, and Sebastian wants to swallow him whole. 

“Thank you, young master,” he says, upon him in seconds with flutter of wool tailcoats. He undoes the buttons easily, quickly, artfully. Ciel watches his deft fingers in awe, face softening. It reminds Sebastian of vanilla ice cream melting into a bowl, a silver spoon disappearing into a newly sore mouth, cream and sugar and cold and cavities. He sighs, remembering he knows so little about children.

“It really hurt, you know,” Ciel sulks, letting Sebastian’s gloves hands brush chastely across his skin, shucking his shirt in favor of bedclothes. 

“I thought a boy of your age who has lived through such tragedy and pain, would not react to such a small pinch. However, I gravely apologize for misjudging the situation,” Sebastian says gently, pushing a thorn into tender flesh to see how Ciel will react to its festering ache. He wants Ciel to trust him, yes. But he also wants Ciel to trust him as he is: inhuman and rich with pain to offer. 

Ciel’s gaze darkens again, jaw immediately hardening in incredulity. “I was _surprised,_ ” he snaps, glaring up at Sebastian. “If I had anticipated you _pulling it out_ , I wouldn’t have reacted that way. I’ve obviously felt far worse pain, and I’m not _afraid_ of worse pain.” 

“I see,” Sebastian sighs, threading fingers into Ciel’s hair to untie the cords of his eyepatch. “If you had time to prepare yourself, you could have braced against and accepted the pain?” The thought of Ciel steeling himself against agony, his pale cheeks creased with anticipation, forces a sick wave of feeling into Sebastian’s chest. He cannot name the feeling, he does not have words, but his hands drops to his sides at the strength of it, one fist convulsing over Ciel’s eyepatch as he gazes down upon him.

“Yes,” Ciel asserts, again with the unwavering certitude of youth, staring hard at Sebastian. “Anyway, that’s not the _point_. The point is that you were _not_ acting the way any _good_ butler would act. You just reached inside and took it out. That’s not how you’re supposed to do it.” He reaches up, rubbing his cheek at the memory, grimacing. 

Sebastian drops to his knees, holding Ciel’s delicate hand between his own, pressing it to his cheek. “I am terribly sorry young master,” he murmurs, making sure his head is bent non-threateningly, his eyes half-lidded behind the crisp black half-moon of his lashes. “I have failed in my oath to protect you and carry out your orders exactly how you wish.” 

Surprise flashes momentarily across Ciel’s face, as he is not yet accustomed to having an adult, especially one as tall and imposing as Sebastian, kneel before him in such a blatant display of servitude. It visibly thrills him, brings spots of color to his cheeks. He pulls his hand away and lets it drop to his side. “I accept your apology,” he says quietly.

After rising to his feet, Sebastian guides Ciel to bed, tucking him into his sheets, smoothing hair away from his brow. “May I inspect the damage I inflicted upon my young master?” he asks, making his face is as placid as the grave.

Hesitance flickers across Ciel, and his cheek swells momentarily as he uses the tip of his tongue to poke at the ragged hole in his mouth. Eventually he sighs, chewing his lower lip. “Fine,” he says. “Do what you must.” 

“Open your mouth,” Sebastian instructs, cupping one hand against Ciel’s slender neck to steady himself, the other extending his index finger to gently pry open his jaw. He works patiently around Ciel’s resistance, waiting until it gives and Ciel tilts his chin up, allowing Sebastian’s index finger to push in alongside his tongue. 

The dry drag of cotton over his teeth makes Ciel squirm, but his need to appear brave and nonchalant outweighs his trepidation, and his eyes finally slide shut in surrender. He’s a vision, mouth parted around long gloved fingers, dark hair and white skin in a snowdrift of sheets. Sebastian peers into his mouth, deeply inhaling his sweet, childish exhalations, so heated and damp. He can see the tender red vacancy in Ciel’s otherwise pink gums. It’s not even bleeding anymore, but he flinches as Sebastian prods around it. 

Sebastian could easily stay here and continue, irritating Ciel’s wounds, breathing his breath, holding him here prone and powerless beneath him. But the ritual is already stretching on longer than what could be considered clinical, and he doesn’t know what he’s looking for, how he can mend the tarnished trust of his blunder and still pursue his interest in fraying Ciel’s seams. 

He lets his fingers slide from his slack mouth. “I suggest you swish with a cup of saltwater in the morning to prevent infection. I will make sure to supply you with one after breakfast,” he says, standing upright. 

Ciel rubs spit from his lips with the back of his hand. “Alright,” he responds, voice surprisingly small. He looks confused, like the can tell there is something sinister in Sebastian, something which wants more than he knows how to give, but also like he has nothing else in the entire world to place faith in. He settled into his pillows, audibly swallowing a mouthful of saliva. 

Sebastian brushes his fingers briefly across Ciel’s cheek as he leaves his bedside to snuff the candles. He will leave him to drown in his confusion. If his soul is worthy, he’ll swim to the surface and breathe in that something sinister, allow it to fill his lungs, to sustain him. If not, he won’t, but Sebastian is quite sure he will. He can tell by the way his breath smells, the way his blood looks upon his own hand. As he slips from the room he thinks of exit wounds, of teeth and trust, of Ciel’s lips pressed to the rim of a cup, brimming with hand-mixed saltwater like tears.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big fat UNDERAGE warning on this chapter. No sex yet but it gets weird, just fyi. If you want to begin backing away slowly before it gets worse (which is DOES).

____________

 

The Earl of Phantomhive enlists Sebastian to play with him as a reward after his lessons. They sit opposite one another with a Funtom game set up neatly upon the desk between them, Ciel’s careful hands dividing cards, assigning pieces. 

Sebastian takes his own, a jack rabbit carved from spruce and stained black, and sets it upon the starting space beside Ciel, a white rabbit. He listens dutifully as Ciel explains the rules, reading from a embossed booklet, cheek pressed to his palm as he absently twists a strand of slate hair around his index finger. Sebastian loves watching Ciel commit mundane tasks such as this; he loves the deliberate, idle way aristocrats engage in leisure activities as if they have all the time in the world to burn away. 

It allows him to watch Ciel while Ciel is watching something else, examine the way his young, fine brows draw together in concentration, the way he pouts at any minor inconvenience, the way the slightest lull in their routine is a cause for some grand and dramatic display of boredom. Ciel’s tolerance for boredom is infinitesimal, where his tolerance for pain borders on the inhuman. It makes Sebastian all the more intrigued to know that such a tiny, weak thing can barely endure a lesson in French, but crouches unflinching before the corpse of a bird glistening in a sheen of ants out in the garden, his face inches away and fingers itching to touch, heedless of the brown, cloying smell of rot.

Sebastian gently, quietly encourages Ciel’s curiosity, interested in his interest in the corrupt and corruptible. In all Sebastian’s ample experience living amid and servicing humanity, he has never encountered an individual soul with such a natural potential for undaunted ruthlessness. He will catch glimpses of the boy Ciel Phantomhive used to be, delicate and protected like some tender new bloom resting upon its throne of thorns, and his mouth will water as he imagines the rainstorm which battered soft petals earthward, which ignited the cold and formerly dormant fire residing inside that fragile, bird-boned chest. Sebastian’s duty is to stoke that fire, feed it, carve the callous and unmerciful shape of a king from unhewn ivory. 

After all, Ciel cannot escape the darkness; he cannot escape pain. It is a part of him now, and Sebastian cannot save him from what he has become. He can only cultivate and refine that darkness, he can only become the richest of soils for Ciel to bury himself beneath. It is a purpose to which he devotes himself wholly.

“How do you think it died, young master?” He asks, a stark black shadow behind a crouching boy. 

Ciel leans closer, even pushes his eyepatch up into his hair so he can peer inquisitively with both eyes unobscured. He drinks it in, the base, vulgar reality his dignified upbringing denied him until humanity’s true nature found him, caged him, made him bleed. He points, finger so very close to oily feathers and decay. “I think its neck is broken. Perhaps it fell from a nest?” 

Sebastian drops down beside his master, examining Ciel’s face as Ciel examines the twisted body. His gaze is hard and clinical, nose wrinkled slightly at the smell of decomposition but face otherwise smooth and unfazed. It’s beautiful, like water just newly frozen, and Sebastian imagines warming it to liquid again with his palm. He smiles, something which has been getting easier and easier the more accustomed to his new body he becomes. “Perhaps,” he agrees. “But, look here,” he pulls off a glove, then with a bare finger, reaches forth and carefully lifts a damaged wing. Ants scatter, extending radially like ripples from a thrown stone. Fascinated, Ciel leans closer. 

“Wounds,” he observes, noticing the sickle-moon shape of bite marks, the vivid smear of purple viscera spilling from the bird’s torn abdomen. “So...a cat, maybe. Killed it but didn’t eat it. And the broken neck was from what? Getting tossed about, played with?” 

Sebastian nods, using his discarded glove to wipe putrefaction and a few wayward ants from his fingers. Ciel watches, mouth stunned and parted, face level with the loose pale joints and black tipped nails. “You touched that,” he says, with all the horror and wonder of a ten year old who has just witnessed the unthinkable. “With your bare hand.” 

“Indeed I did,” Sebastian says. “I will wash it quite thoroughly before I touch anything else, young master. You need not fear.” 

As if suddenly recalling his propriety, Ciel stands abruptly upright, casting Sebastian in an accusatory gaze. “That is disgusting. Butlers are _not_ supposed to do things like that.” 

Sebastian’s lips flicker into an amused smile. “The butler of the house of Phantomhive does,” he says simply. Ciel stares for a moment longer, then accepts it. 

Ciel is always trying to tell him what butlers do and do not do, and with each passing day Sebastian realizes with growing fondness and clarity that the Earl of Phantomhive has no comprehension beyond that of a sheltered ten-year-old boy as to what exactly a butler’s duties entail. Sometimes he expects the world of Sebastian, he expects him to change his past, change his world, carve the darkness he is becoming from that storm-torn bloom and build him a new, uncontaminated body. Other times, he expects Sebastian to perform as a textbook butler, the most perfect and professional servant a child could imagine. Sometimes he wants a butler, yes, but also a father, a mother, a caretaker. Someone to stop him from eating parfait for every meal and to soap his back while he soaks in the bath

Because Sebastian was neither human nor butler before he was bound eternally to Ciel’s soul, he finds himself inventing this all-consuming role along the way, feeling out his place beside his master in the dark. When he rebuilt the Phantomhive Manor, it was from the memories of a traumatized, fear-exhausted little boy. He is going off of little more as he builds the Phantomhive Butler. 

“Are you listening to me?” Ciel says doubtfully, snapping Sebastian from his reverie. “Because if you don’t understand the rules you won’t know if I’m cheating or not.” 

Sebastian reaches for the twin dice, snatching them up in an elegant gloved hand. “Young Master,” he mocks, looking very serious. “I know due to your good and honest nature you would never play dishonestly with your butler.” 

He rolls the dice, six and one, and moves his rabbit the appropriate number of spaces. Ciel is looking at him with narrowed eyes, clearly attempting to assess whether or not Sebastian is blind to his penchant for deceit, or if he is being deceived himself. “Your roll, young master.” 

After several more turns, Ciel flattens his palm and decidedly swipes all the cards and pieces from the game board, upsetting them from the table in a clatter of black and white. Sebastian’s eyes feign surprise, but inside he is sick with delight. “This is dreadfully dull,” Ciel announces. “I used to play this game with Lady Elizabeth every time she visited. I remember one night when it was raining outside, we played it three times in a row, laughing about something. I remember it being fun.” 

“Young master has grown considerably in the last several months,” Sebastian reminds him, reaching out and covering Ciel’s small, pale hand with his own for a fleeting moment. “Things which were fun for a young boy may not be so fun now.” 

Ciel suddenly looks very tired, the blue in his eye darkening, his neck becoming limp and heavy. He lays his cheek upon the table, idly tracing his index finger over the path of spaces on the game board, no longer fun to travel. “It makes me sad,” he admits without looking at Sebastian. “It feels like this part of me has died. I keep trying to do the things I did, to play the games I enjoyed, but it just doesn’t feel the same way anymore.” 

Sebastian stands and strides to the side of the table, where he begins to bend at the waist and collect the scattered game pieces from the floor. “My lord, may I perhaps suggest that instead of trying to find pleasure in activities you used to enjoy, you find new activities.” 

“Like what?” He asks, moping. 

“Chess could serve as a somewhat more challenging alternative.” 

Ciel huffs, using his finger and thumb to flick a final card off the table and onto the floor for Sebastian to pick up. “My father was teaching me chess, before he died. I was not very good at it.” 

Sebastian is thankful that he is out of his master’s eyeshot, for his smile is splitting, his eyes are smoldering and carmine as he covers his fanged mouth with a tremulous hand. Ciel is changing before him, blooming forth, tattered white petals stained crimson with soon to be shed blood. And Sebastian will be there, he will be there to lick the stickiness from pale hands, he will be there to hold that black heart and extend it towards heaven like an offering he stole. He collects himself, and stands. 

“If I may, I happen to be a formidable chess opponent,” He explains. “I would be happy to replace the late Vincent Phantomhive as the young master’s instructor.” He bows swiftly. 

There is a hesitant moment during which Ciel regards Sebastian from his place upon the table, pink cheek looking a shade pinker where it is pressed to smooth stained wood. He licks his lips, thinking hard about something, perhaps about a long, pale finger digging about fetid feathers, coming away glistening with ants. “Fine,” he finally agrees, sitting upright. “Teach me.” 

\---

Most mornings, it is a chore to urge the Earl of Phantomhive from the warm cocoon of his bedsheets, no matter how reasonable the hour. Sebastian employs a number of creative tactics, but still Ciel fights and thrashes and wails, burrowing deeper into his bed, heavy smudges of darkness beneath his eyes like ash. Eventually he’ll emerge on his own accord, cheeks puffy and creased above the rim of his teacup, feet dragging as he trudges down the stairs to balefully push eggs about his plate with a fork. Then as night falls, a new battle to get him _into_ bed begins. Sebastian is an expert at many things, but sleep, which is neither necessary or particularly restorative for demons, is not one of those things.

After months of this agonizing regimen, it dawns upon Sebastian that Ciel’s difficulty sleeping may be more severe and pervasive than the usual resistance expected of a ten year old boy. He’s so often limp and sullen with exhaustion that Sebastian suspects he might not actually be getting any rest at all, instead tossing fitfully all night, too proud to admit he is afraid of the horrors he imagines lurking beneath the bed, mortified into silence by his own nightmares. 

“There is no shame in fearing darkness, young master,” Sebastian tries, gripping a candelabra beside Ciel’s bedside with a tight fist. “Especially given the nature of the darkness you have endured in your short life.” 

Ciel, who is sulking in bed with his knees drawn up to his chin, throws a withering look in Sebastian’s direction. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he snaps. “I do not _fear the darkness_. I do not fear you, do I?” 

_Not anymore_ , Sebastian thinks, setting down the candles upon the bedside table and tentatively approaching from a different angle. “No, you do not. I have only been observing that even after a full night’s rest, you appear lethargic. I am concerned for my young master’s health,” he explains. 

Ciel sighs dramatically, flopping down onto his back and gazing somewhere over Sebastian’s shoulder and into the unspecified shadows behind him, where any number of fates could be hiding. “I told you already,” he mumbles. “Sleep is boring. I do not enjoy boring things.” 

Sebastian smiles, pleased with himself for knowing with certainty that Ciel is lying to him. There’s a glassy sadness to his master’s eyes, and his contract seal is pulsing faintly, glowing beneath the messy curtain of dark hair. Sebastian imagines crouching over his small, breakable body, holding it pinned between his knees as he bends, gently coaxing the unspoken order from the proof in Ciel’s eyes with tender lips. There is something Ciel is not telling him, something he wants to ask but cannot. The insignia upon his own hand burns distantly in emphasis.

“My lord,” He murmurs, dropping to his knees at the bedside, head bent. “I do know how deeply you are affected by ennui. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to be of assistance.” 

Ciel shakes his head, then rolls over onto his side, peering down at Sebastian. He has already used the excuse of boredom in efforts to avoid sleep some time ago, insisting that Sebastian play chess with him well into the night in favor of retiring. However, this experiment proved to be a failure seeing as he was entirely too drowsy to stay awake at the table let alone play a game of strategy. Sebastian ended up carrying him to bed that night, and carrying him out of bed the following morning, the battle raging on as always. “Before they died, my mother and father would help me sleep. When I was bored,” Ciel finally admits. 

“Did they?” Sebastian asks, tilting his chin up to examine Ciel, to parse out the bud of truth from where it is buried between petals of lies. Ciel’s face is flat and stubborn, eyes flashing, daring to be called on his bluff. “May I further inquire as to how?” Sebastian prys gently. 

“They...” Ciel trails off, then rolls over onto his other side, so that he is facing a dark and empty wall instead of his butler. “They took me into their bed. My mother would read me a story. It’s somehow more dull to sleep alone, but with them--” He cuts himself off, falls as silent as death. Sebastian’s hand flutters up and into the secret tunnels in the sheets like a dove, creeping toward the delicate curve of Ciel’s lower back. He stops a few inches short of skin and swallows a thick mouthful of saliva, eyes red and raging. 

“Demons do not often sleep, though we can, if we choose to,” he whispers. 

“That’s fine,” Ciel says in a muffled voice. Sebastian wishes he could see his face, those snow-pale cheeks flushed a deep pink from the confusion and shame of being but a boy, lost and frightened in a world where the devil is your only savior. 

“Very well,” Sebastian says, sliding an arm beneath his young master’s bent knees, the other encircling his delicate ribcage. As he is lifted from the sheets, Ciel buries his face into Sebastian’s neck, still hiding. Sebastian smiles into soft, dusky hair, and carries Ciel down the hall and to his own room. 

It’s dark and only lightly furnished, a twin bed and mostly bare closet where he hangs his numerous starched shirts and overcoats a in a row of orderly black and white like piano keys. He spends little time in this room which is supposed to be his own, so the bed is of course, neatly made. In a solitary swift and inhuman motion, Sebastian turns down the sheets, and places Ciel amid them where he sits, looking small and dark and misplaced, even in this more reasonably sized bed. He is all wide blue eyes salt-worn and wave-tossed like sea-glass, pale bony limbs protruding from bed clothes several sizes too large. 

Sebastian regards him, kicking off his dress shoes and nudging them beneath the bed, beginning to recline beside his master and swallow whatever is to come. 

Ciel wrinkles his nose. “You aren’t going to lie down in those clothes, are you?” he asks, voice incredulous. 

Sebastian raises his eyebrows. “No?” 

“No. They’ll get wrinkled, and it won’t be comfortable. Don’t you have something to sleep in? A night shirt or something?” He settles himself deeper into Sebastian’s sheets, hair a chaotic dark cloud spread about him upon the pillow like a crown of thorns. He makes a beautiful picture, so infant and crucified. 

Sebastian shakes his head. “As I explained, young master, demons rarely sleep. But for your sake as my companion tonight, I will attempt to.” He flourishes his wrist and procures a linen nightshirt from nothingness. It flutters like a sail in the dark, and Ciel is enthralled. 

He continues to stare with huge eyes as Sebastian undresses, shrugging off his vest and waistcoat, a puzzle of buckles and snaps far beyond Ciel’s own capabilities, two blots of darkness he folds precisely before hanging. Then Sebastian carefully unbuttons his shirt, discarding it as easily as an exhalation as he watches Ciel watch him like he is a sunrise, like he is the first snowfall of winter. 

Ciel has never seen any of Sebastian’s skin save for that which he sees every day, the ivory inch between his gloved wrist and cuffed sleeve, and very occasionally his forearms when he rolls up his sleeves. He leans onto his knees to get closer, visibly fascinated by the quiet, tempered strength in Sebastian’s body, the smooth planes of muscle lying in segments beneath silver-white skin. He squints, scrutinizing Sebastian from behind his lashes. “You almost look like my father.” He yawns then stretches out, eyes growing heavier the longer he fights sleep. “But not quite. You are more like a statue.” 

Sebastian smiles as he pulls the night-shirt over his head, allowing it to fall before reaching beneath the hem to unbutton his trousers. He is amused that a child with such a cunning, shrewd mind does not assume the similarity is intentional. Lastly, he pulls off his gloves before lowering himself down beside Ciel, finding his tiny body in the dark and drawing it close, breath huffing quietly from them both. He loves the sound of fabric dragging against itself, the shift of skin across the sheets, the muted, wordless murmur from Ciel’s lips as he’s gripped and torn and promised. 

Ciel feels impossibly fragile against him, this breakable mess of thin bones and hot blood held together miraculously by Sebastian’s arms. They lie together, minutes passing sweet and slow like molasses, the night resting around them and holding its breath. Ciel sighs and stirs, and Sebastian sucks each sigh in past his own lips, luxuriating in the flavor. “Do you find this dull?” Sebastian asks, and feels Ciel shake his head against him, silky hair shifting against his own cheek. 

Sebastian inhales deeply from him, overwhelmed with the close, salty smell of little boy. He smells acutely human, sharp and coppery with youth and mortality. His mouth waters, grip tightening, making Ciel squirm without struggling. “Is this how your father helped you sleep?” Sebastian asks, lids shut tight over eyes of fire. 

“Yes,” Ciel whispers back. “Kind of. Less touching maybe.” 

“Would you prefer I touch you less?” Sebastian asks, lips skirting across a smooth hairline. 

“No,” Ciel answers, though in his wavering child’s voice.

Sebastian’s own barely mastered human body is wracked with confusion, skin tingling and breathing shallow with want. He doesn’t know exactly what it is he wants, but he is aching for more, this soul steeped in its sea of blood, ten years old and tangy with fear. He wants to break this tiny body in two, split him along his ribcage and worm a long finger into the hollow of his aorta. He wants to work the grain of sand in his palms, over and over, and he wants to kiss the pearl it becomes. 

He props himself up on his elbow over Ciel, gazing down upon him, this small dark thing afloat in many white sheets, held down by a vast expanse of yearning white skin. Sebastian touches him everywhere, over his shoulders and delicate arms, across his flickering eyelids and soft slack lips and chest with its rapid rise and fall. He is gentle and Ciel does not stop him, not even as he palms up underneath his nightshirt, pushing it about his neck to expose a narrow white torso, heaving in the night. 

Sebastian wants to count the Earl of Phantomhive’s ribs, and he wants to do so with his mouth. He has seduced and had countless humans, but this feels nothing like that careful, calculated dance of whispered words and wandering fingers, it feels like nothing, like nothing at all, and everything all at once. Sebastian bends his head to pray, dragging a soft, open mouth down Ciel’s bare sternum, tongue swirling as he goes. 

Ciel makes a wordless noise, high and breathy like birdsong, hands flying up to clutch mad, desperate handfuls of Sebastian’s hair as if he is afraid he will be taken away by the tide if he’s not anchored to something. Sebastian holds him in place, kissing down to the soft pale cups beside his hip bones and up again to his sternum, rubbing his cheek along a the creamy concave of his stomach. Ciel holds fast, reeling and rocking like a sailboat amid white capped waves. 

Sebastian can taste his clean, boyish sweat. He can taste his grief, his fury, his confusion, the wild, pure hate of a ten year old tortured enough to call the devil to his side and take his hand. He rubs gently up either side of his ribcage, feeling Ciel shudder and twist underneath him like a storm, feeling gooseflesh tremble to life beneath his tongue. It feels like everything, like every single moment of one thousand years spent abhorring humanity condensed down to a single point of suction upon the chest of a child. Sebastian kisses the pearl he finds there, he kisses and does not stop kissing. 

It eventually becomes too much for Ciel to take, and he goes limp with shock, panting as he collapses into the sheets and shivers to pieces, eyes shut against the dual glow of red in the night. Sebastian pulls away to pet his hair, his cheeks, thumbing along the smudges of sleepless shadow beneath his eyes. Darkness is escaping from Sebastian in twisting plumes like ink in clear water, billowing about them both, chasing moonlight from the room with teeth at its shining heel. He carefully covers Ciel’s already closed eyes his bare hand, so that he does not have to witness the eddying blackness consuming them, so that he does not have to fear the dark. Then he draws a single talon down the center of Ciel’s chest, towards his navel, lower still. 

“Sleep, young master,” Sebastian murmurs against Ciel’s ear, lips lingering at his temple, pupils narrowed to slits of obsidian slicing through a sea of red. “And l will protect you through the night.” 

“And through the day?” Ciel slurs through exhaustion, eyelids trembling against Sebastian’s clawed, sable palm. 

“And evermore,” he answers, kissing the back of his own hand where the contract seal is still ignited, a fierce violet glowing forth from and endless, consumptive black.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So part of what I as trying to convey with this story was a potential newness that Sebastian and Ciel both share: Ciel's youth and Sebastian's human form. I tend to imagine that instead of jumping from contract to contract as some demons might, that Sebastian is the kind of demon to hang around waiting for a worthy soul to come around, meaning he might spend more time in the underworld than your average demon, he might be a little out of practice with human conventions. SOME FOOD FOR THOUGHT. Please continue reading this, the reception thus far has been mind-blowing!

________

The Earl of Phantomhive badly wishes to appear more resilient than he truly is, older and wiser and braver and colder. It is a terrific feat, seeing as he is already so stunningly resilient, too wise and brave and cold for a boy of ten. Sebastian can see past cracks in his armor, to the places from which his fear leaks and shows, like blood seeping out from a crudely stitched wound. In truth, part of Ciel’s appeal is his duality: his youth coupled with his stripped innocence, his trauma laced ferocity in the face of danger. He is full of contradicting impulses and and crossed nerves, a beautiful latticework of complexities that Sebastian enjoys tracing with a fingernail, with the tip of his tongue. Ciel is a maze he is content to be lost within, at least for now while he is still sowing seeds. 

However, Ciel’s tendency to conceal his fallibility does make it somewhat challenging for Sebastian to satisfy his every wish, as many of his wishes he has deemed too childish or vulnerable to utter, instead allowing them to fester and rot within him until it all becomes too much to bear and Sebastian is forced to fish the truth from the infection. Because Ciel is still wary of revealing what he perceives as weakness to Sebastian, he will attempt to deny himself pleasure and comfort, things he needs, things Sebastian is more than willing to give. 

Sebastian would train him if he knew how, but it’s a delicate issue. He does not have enough experience with children to do the work for Ciel, to guide his orders in the appropriate direction, to show him that his vulnerabilities are delicious rather than shameful to behold. He can only observe, he can only wander the labyrinth and wait, stepping through open doors, or at least forcing himself through those which are ajar or unlocked. 

Eventually, after painstaking blunders and long suffering bouts of frustrated dissatisfaction, Ciel will break down. In his core of cores he _needs_ a father, a mentor, and tutor, a butler, a savior. He needs someone to hold him upright now that his strings have been severed, he needs someone to take his hand and lead him through the dark until his eyes adjust to its endlessness. When this need becomes too profound it consumes his pride and he comes crawling to Sebastian, head heavy and knees raw. 

They have been dancing around some unnamed desire of Ciel’s all day. He keeps alternating between sighing mournfully with crossed arms as if it is Sebastian’s fault for not carrying out some silent command, and shaking his head in irritation, jaw set tight and eyes blazing like he can somehow dislodge his own youth if he tries hard enough.

They are currently in the library, Ciel curled around the history book he is supposed to be reading, reclined on the love seat tucked into the west alcove, which is lit with an open bay window. He began his studies at his desk, but declared after some time that it was far too uncomfortable to continue there, and requested that he move to the love seat. Sebastian was suspicious then, but he is far more suspicious now. The chilly fall breeze is ruffling Ciel’s hair and the pages as he reads, his eyes darting fitfully over the same several lines of prose over and over again. He has made little progress since relocating, and it is becoming clear that discomfort is not the issue at hand. 

Sebastian strides to the window and closes it pointedly. “You will catch cold, young master,” he says, glancing over his shoulder at Ciel’s tiny frame, dwarfed by the twisted oak back of the love seat with its crimson upholstery. He looks very young, and very tired. “Shall I bring you another blanket? You may pause if you wish, and dictate to me the contents of the last chapter.” 

“No,” Ciel says, closing his book with a decisive snap. “I’m not _cold_. I’m bored.” He flops onto his back, stretching pale, willowy legs out until they hang limply off the edge of the love seat, stocking feet jutting out from beneath the hem of the blanket he is reading beneath. “History is meaningless. It is just someone’s _idea_ of what happened, not what actually happened, and _whatever_ happened, it happened so _long_ ago. Why does it matter?”

“Hmm” Sebastian says, sitting down alongside the Earl of Phantomhive, trapping his legs to the cushion of the love seat with his own back. Ciel’s cheeks color, as if he has just remembered the places upon his body Sebastian’s mouth discovers and maps at night. “Might I remind the young master of his own past?” Sebastian says gently, glancing sidelong at Ciel with a inhuman curl to his lips. 

Ciel’s color deepens. “That was not so very long ago.” 

Sebastian nods curtly, eyes sliding closed and open palm pressed to his heart. “Forgive me. Time is somewhat relative to a creature as old as myself. Now,” He says in a new, brisk pace, turning to Ciel. “Your studies. I am noticing you’re having difficulty staying focused.” 

Perhaps it is the barb of his past digging into his side like a thorn, perhaps it is all the years of Sebastian’s strange and elusive life before him digging into his palms like nails, but Ciel is suddenly quiet and stunned and flushed, worn down and polished so that all of his ten years show. “I suppose,” he mumbles, dropping his gaze to the closed cover of his book. “My eyes are tired. I keep reading the same stupid paragraph over and over again but I can never remember what it says,” he complains. Sebastian can tell he is trying to inject venom into his words, but it is not working. He’s shifty and restless now that Sebastian is touching him, just the small of his back pressed into those delicate legs, but it surely reminds him of other things, more confusing touches he half remembers from sleepless nights. His tongue pokes at the corner of his mouth, scrutinizing Sebastian from a dark wing of hair. He wants something he is afraid to ask for, that much is clear. 

“I see. Well, we simply must devise an alternative way for you to study this afternoon which does not involve reading, so that you can rest your strained eyes,” Sebastian offers. “As long as it does not become a habit.” 

It is a clear enough suggestion that Ciel takes the bait, gaze dropping completely to his lap as he mutters, “You could read to me. My mother sometimes read me stories at night.” Then he sits up, drawing his legs out from behind Sebastian and to his own chest, so that he is gathered in on himself, tight and defensive. He looks disappointed with himself.

“I’d be happy to, young master,” Sebastian replies. He struggles to keep his face placid, although there is a flare sparked and smoking inside of him, a thrill born from Ciel’s desire for care winning out over his desire to appear careless. Sebastian wants the truth of him, the real boy hiding inside that coiled mess of vine and wire, bruised and bleeding. He wants the one who hurts, not the one too callous for such things. It is Ciel’s despair which makes him so singular, so appealing. Sebastian reaches across the love seat and takes the book in his hands.

After thumbing through the volume to the proper chapter he begins to read, stealing glances at Ciel every several sentences, at his closed eyes, his smooth cheeks, his head tucked against the cushioned upholstery behind him, drifting ever closer to Sebastian’s shoulder. 

“Are you listening?” Sebastian asks. 

“Yes,” Ciel murmurs back, voice in a hush. “The Phoenician ships were called _hippoi_ because they had horses head carved into them. Go on.” 

As Sebastian continues, Ciel nods ever nearer, until their sides are touching and the weight of his head nudges against Sebastian’s sleeve. His breath comes out shallow and disgraced, like he does not want to want this, but cannot help wanting it all the same. “Young master, allow me,” Sebastian says, taking what Ciel quietly grants him. 

He shifts subtly so that he is leaning against the arm of the love seat, dragging Ciel down with him, pulling his tiny body into his arms, onto his chest. Ciel grows breathless so quickly, clutching at him, not limp but not resistant. As if nothing has happened, Sebastian resumes his lesson about the Phoenicians, Ciel startled by receiving his wish, no matter its unspeakable nature. 

“Are you comfortable?” Sebastian asks lightly.

“Yes,” Ciel says, voice too small, ten years old and brimming with shards of self-recrimination. Sebastian smooths a hand through his hair and Ciel shuts his eyes against the drag of it. “Sebastian?” He murmurs after a moment of labored breath through clenched teeth. “You said, before, that you were very old. How old are you exactly?” Finally, he makes himself look at Sebastian, peering through his hair, cheeks hot and eye spilling over with pupil, dark like a moonless night. 

“I fear it has been so very long I cannot answer _exactly_ ,” Sebastian explains. “However, I can tell you with certainty I have sailed upon a _hippoi_ ship, and I have done business with Phoenician traders.” 

Ciel’s elegant brows arch upon his forehead, cheek creased where it presses to the hems and ribbing in Sebastian’s double-breasted waistcoat. It is an impossible amount of time for a human to fathom, for a ten year old child to fathom, but Sebastian is intrigued by Ciel’s genuine attempt to comprehend. He watches Ciel grapple with the immensity of the thing he is splayed out upon, watches the tiny pink tongue flit out to lick his lips and he counts in his head, brow furrowed as he works out the math. “Wow,” Ciel says eventually, eyes skirting up to Sebastian’s face, narrowed with suspicion. 

Then, with a very tentative hand, he reaches out. Sebastian closes his eyes, thinking it will make this easier for both of them if he is not gazing at him with flashing eyes, salivating. Soft, narrow fingers alight upon the glacial cut of Sebastian’s cheekbone, brushing down to his jawline and lower still to the tendons in his neck, the flicker of his pulse, feather light and experimental. Then, another hand threads through his hair, blunt nails razing lightly down the bridge of his nose, stopping finally to rest curiously at his lips. His fingers are warm and smell faintly like book and ink and the allspice from the muesli he ate this morning. Save for those wandering hands, Ciel is frozen, breath held, heart hammering.

Sebastian parts his lips, letting Ciel feel the tips of his incisors again, wanting badly to lick the salt and spice from his fingertips but holding back to prevent the shatter of anything fragile, crucial. His adam’s apple bobs under one hand, breath shuddering out beneath the other. “You don’t look that old,” Ciel says eventually, hands falling away like snow, coming to rest atop Sebastian's clavicles. 

His eyes flutter open, scintillating and crimson, pupils narrowed to sinister slits of black. He tries to hold it back, but the red surges forth. It is like attempting to cease the bleeding from a sliced jugular with a singular bandage; it just keeps bleeding through. “I’m not human,” he reminds the Earl of Phantomhive, who in spite of himself needs a father, a mentor, and tutor, a butler, a savior. Someone to hold him upright now that his strings have been severed, someone to take his hand and lead him through the dark until his eyes adjust to its endlessness. Sebastian carefully closes the book resting in the crook of his elbow, letting it fall forgotten into crack between love seat cushions. Then he encircles Ciel’s narrow wrists with gloved hands, squeezing until he feels delicate bones grind together, until he sees a wince flicker across that boyish, stricken face. He lets go to see if Ciel pulls away, scuttles off of him like he has been burnt. 

He does not. He blinks an unrealized wetness away from his eyes, inhaling raggedly with resignation far beyond his ten years. Then, his head drifts back to Sebastian’s lie of a heartbeat. “I know you’re not human,” he mumbles. 

“Does that frighten you?” Sebastian asks, tucking his thumb under the cords of Ciel’s eyepatch, tugging it from his skin gently so he can gaze upon the sharp lines and angles of their shared covenant. Ciel’s newly exposed eye blinks and squints in the new light. 

There is fear hiding in the vacancies of that five-pointed star, there is fear watering down the glistening cyan rimming its counterpart. Ciel Phantomhive, despite all his pain and all his glory, is but a ten year old boy clutched between the obsidian talons of hell, of course he is frightened, of course. But still, he swallows, rubbing his cheek mindlessly into Sebastian’s chest, quaking beneath claws disguised as gloved palms. “No,” is his answer. He says it with the firmness of someone who knows that lies become truths if repeated enough.

“Good boy,” Sebastian tells him, fingers climbing down the ladder of his spine. “However, if you were afraid, it would not be something to be ashamed of. True bravery is sustaining fear, not fear’s absence.” 

Ciel’s eyes widen, as if this is a revelation. They lie together, until his breathing slows. 

\---

Sebastian allows his master to dictate where they will end up each night. Sometimes after a long day of fencing lessons or a polo game, Ciel will fall asleep easily in his own bed, eyes too heavy for nightmares, limbs twitching even as Sebastian blows out the candles and takes his leave. However, other nights the restlessness consumes him; he grows morose and petulant as twilight descends and Sebastian knows where this will lead, knows he will not polish any silverware tonight, knows the holes in the tablecloth will remain unmended. 

Ciel stalks up the stairs ahead of him, skipping the door to his own room and continuing along to Sebastian’s. He doesn’t say anything, but Sebastian knows to follow, a dutiful dog at the end of his master’s leash, there to catch him should he be cut adrift and become lost in the mouth of this cavernous hallway. 

Some nights they lay side by side and do not touch, Sebastian remaining quiet and still until he hears Ciel’s breath become measured with sleep, allowing him to slip away and return to being the Phantomhive butler. Other nights they will begin as such, but once the candles flicker to smoke and the darkness settles upon them, Ciel will reach out and find Sebastian’s hand in the warm mess of sheets and pull it towards his body, only to deposit it upon his back, his shoulder. Then Sebastian knows he has permission to do as he pleases, to see how much of Ciel’s tiny, pale body can fit in the whole of one single palm. 

He is careful not to break Ciel, but less careful when it comes to overstimulating him, overwhelming him, frightening him. He wants Ciel’s soul to be blackened by his own influence, he wants to shape its supple whiteness into cruel barbs of ice, if only so he can soften them with his own mouth later, draw blood to the tender tip of his ever-extended finger. He needs Ciel to learn that his hate and his sorrow cannot be severed from the rest of him because they are _him_ , they are the material from which his bones are now hewn. That pain cannot be escaped, but it can be endured, learned from, longed for. When his master lets him, he licks these words into his skin, across his shoulders and down his spine like praying the rosary. 

Sometimes Ciel arches into him, rolls onto his stomach and pushes his hips into Sebastian’s mattress as he rides the wave of his own sick, mad confusion, caught blind and hungry in the paroxysm of too much feeling for his small, young body. It stuns Sebastian that he can not only sustain such a deluge, but seeks it out, small hands and sweat-damp skin in the dark. For all he is teaching his young master, and for all the influence he wields over his still-malleable mind, Ciel’s inherent curiosity and limitless pursuit of sensation astonish Sebastian, shake him deeply and seismically. Ciel is like a painting he keeps adding layers of pigment to, only to realize that there is tremendous, tormenting depth already carved into the canvas, making his creation textured in ways he never anticipated. He runs his palms over the topography of what he has built, only to finds its structure pre-laid with a terrible, sound darkness. 

Sebastian grows more certain with each passing day spent as the Phantomhive butler that their contract was not mere coincidence, but something written into their shared mythology, like rope woven from two strands of gold thread and stained black with blood. As he lies beside his sleeping master each night and carefully combs his fingers through silk-soft hair, he dreams. 

He dreams of his centuries-long oscillation between the human realm and the underworld in desperate search of the termination to his loneliness, his perpetual, maddening hunger. He dreams of the blessed and spoiled child Ciel could have been, all his potential for the beauty of savagery untouched, untapped. He dreams, and he knows, they are for one another. He was meant to find Ciel Phantomhive and tear into his darkness, just as Ciel Phantomhive was born to be his last and more precious supper. 

Ciel twists up off the bed and into Sebastian’s open hands, eyes shut tight against the rage of stars, face red and damp and rubbing mindlessly into the clutched sheets. “Does it feel good?” Sebastian whispers into the night, raking nails ever so gently from Ciel’s underarms to the outsides of his thighs, one long, tender line of almost-pink. Ciel arches narrow hips and rocks backwards onto Sebastian’s lap for a split second, whining unintelligibly, drool making his lips glint in the darkness before he pushes himself back down onto the mattress. 

“I think so,” he might say, words stuck and muffled by cotton. “I want--” he manages, more clearly articulated in a spit-thick voice. “I want...” 

Sebastian’s treacherous human stomach clenches and drops like a seabird into the deep. He has been teaching Ciel to ask for what he wants, to order it with unflinching certainty so that there is no way for any adversary to mistake his conviction. He fits himself momentarily against the ten year old before him, locking them together like mechanisms in his pocket-watch, endlessly tick-ticking. “What is it you want, young master?” He asks, breath hot against the lowermost dip in Ciel’s back. 

“I want you to. I don’t know. It’s absurd,” Ciel mumbles, hiding his florid face in the crook of his elbow. 

“I cannot follow your orders if you do not express them clearly, my lord,” Sebastian reminds him, a lesson he repeats often.

Ciel’s small body convulses with a great sigh and he stays willfully silent for a moment, hips shifting almost imperceptibly to create friction between his flesh and the sheets, a tiny, involuntary motion. Sebastian knows Ciel isn’t aware of what he’s doing, and that knowledge makes his chest ache, a pain so sharp and real he nearly lets go of Ciel to check for blood. It’s a habit he is still trying to break. 

“Ok. I just...you’re doing it so soft. Like I’m a cat. Can’t you...” he trails off, clearly hoping Sebastian will finish the sentence for him, or at least take some action to complete an order which is not there. Of course, Sebastian does not. He merely kisses one of two shallow dimples at the very base of Ciel’s spine, traces its perimeter with the tip of his tongue, making Ciel writhe and squirm in overwhelm. “Can’t you do it _harder_? Make it hurt, a little,” he wheezes. 

The heart Sebastian has not yet tamed feels somewhat like it is breaking, and again, again he is stunned to feel the chasm yawn inside of him. How is it that this pitiful thing, this tragic white larvae he plucked from a cage of blood to call his own, tears at him so? How is it that the ten year old Earl of Phantomhive can contain so much latent beauty? Sebastian sucks in a low, shuddering breath, and slides his hands up Ciel’s ribs. He lingers there for a moment, feeling the give of soft skin beneath his nails before he drags them down with firm, deliberate pressure. “Yes, my lord.” 

Ciel hisses and freezes, face scrunching up like a single red rose and Sebastian feels every notch of him, every dip and crevice. He can see the raised pink marks even in the shadows, he can feel bits of Ciel tearing and ripping in his wake. “Better?” He asks, voice so soft he is surprised Ciel hears and answers it at all. 

“Yes,” he sighs, the words coming out soft and sticky and sated. “Yes. Do it just like that, until I fall asleep?” 

“Goodness,” Sebastian murmurs. “My little lord finds this relaxing?” 

“Well...yes. But it also stings. But in a nice way. And when it’s over I feel worn out like I sprinted in the garden,” he explains. “I feel like I can sleep.” 

“I see,” he says, scraping down Ciel’s sides again and this time, even further down his legs, stopping a hand’s width away from the tender backs of his knees. His own hands are trembling, the whole of him trembling to contain the eddies of darkness which beg to shatter his frame and escape into the night. “Well,” he says, bending this time to gently lick along the pathway his nails just forged into his master’s skin, lips sucking away a faint metallic tinge. Ciel yelps at the sting, contorting in Sebastian’s grip. “I am happy to oblige.” 

They stay this way for awhile, Ciel groaning and keening occasionally but sinking into the bed like a stone cast from a tall ship with each new passage, Sebastian breathing like a creature which only just learned how to breathe, thinking with a sick, grand recklessness, _the world is septic and humanity is diseased, but somewhere within that chaos of despair there are two embers glowing red, and you can follow their promise anywhere. They will never fade, and they will never lie. They are yours to fall headlong into, young master. They are yours in which to drown._


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ciel is LITTLE BIT older now. But not enough for all you all to be pardoned into heaven ;) Also, I dedicate this chapter (and the one which follows) to DustofWarfare, who share my sick obsession with Ciel using a gun. Enjoy!

Three days before Ciel’s eleventh birthday, he announces to Sebastian with childish certitude that he has no interest in celebrating it. Sebastian nods curtly, though somewhat suspicious, and makes no further plans nor preparations for the date because it is his job to obey his master, and obey him completely. However, when the morning of Ciel’s birthday dawns and there is tea and breakfast as usual but no sentiment to accompany them, Ciel grows sullen and morose, refusing the nutmeg-raisin scone and Darjeeling Sebastian brings for him. 

“Is there nothing pleasant to look forward to in this whole stupid world,” he snarls, crossing skinny arms over his chest, glowering down at the teacup before him. He leans forward and reaches onto Sebastian’s cart to steal the scone and plate it rests upon, bring them both into bed with him. 

Sebastian is perplexed. He can sense that Ciel is disappointed there are no sweets or gifts, despite his former wishes for there _not_ to be. It’s illogical and magnificently human, and although Sebastian cannot understand it, he finds it intriguing, beautiful. Humanity is a cesspool of contradicting impulses, a mess of foolish yearning. And here is this child sitting in the middle of that mess, crystal eyes and dirty hands. 

“There is your revenge,” Sebastian offers. “Making those who caused your suffering to suffer in return.” 

Ciel sighs, glum-faced and sulky. “Yes. But beyond that.” 

For Sebastian, there is nothing beyond that, beyond the blood-slick chessboard of Ciel Phantomhive’s grand and awful wish. He stands for a moment, stunned to thoughtful silence as he contemplates the vast wasteland of opposing confusions which Ciel is forever wandering. There are days when the young master seems well beyond his age, a withered and black soul somehow contained in the pale, diminutive body of a newly eleven year old. But then there are days, _birthdays_ , when Sebastian remembers that Ciel _is_ but a child, and a trauma-warped one at that. There are days he cannot forget it. 

Ciel is dismantling his scone, ripping off bits of and plucking the raisins from the carnage, only to pile them as the edge of his plate beside the sprig of mint like a a collection of tiny, severed heads. Sebastian watches him, watches the smooth, lovely tilt of his wrist like the neck of a baby bird as he crumbles scone into the bedsheets. Sebastian will have to clean them later. 

He sighs deeply, thinking of all the things humanity denies itself, and all the things hell can provide. “I do not know, young master. Perhaps if you actively seek pleasure each day, you can find it. However, you simply cannot expect the universe to bestow it upon you, or for the people in your universe to help you find it if you do not _ask_ their help.” 

Ciel drops his defiant gaze, hair falling into his face and obscuring his eyes so that Sebastian cannot see their fire, their blown-glass blue, nor the smudge of angry red beneath them. He looks so small, so destructible, and Sebastian would like to reach out with both hands and crush him to dust between them, then lick his palms clean with a forked tongue. “I’m not hungry,” Ciel mumbles, pushing the ruined scone across the bed. 

“Very well,” Sebastian sighs, clearing the blankets. “Allow me to put this away in the kitchen. I will return to dress you momentarily.” 

Ciel does not reply, only flops back down into the covers, which he then draws over his head. He creates the smallest concentration of fury and loathing beneath them, a ball drawn tightly in on itself like a coiled spring set to ricochet. It is the result of ten years during which he had everything a boy could ever want, followed by a single year in which all of that was stripped away and replaced with the loyalty of the devil. It is much to take. 

Sebastian considers returning to the bedside and prying Ciel apart like a clam’s shell and sipping the brine which leaks forth, forcing his ill-mannered little lord to admit his folly and _order him_ , order him to fall to his knees in celebration of one more wretched year upon this wretched earth. _Order_ him to give him everything a boy could ever want, and more.The hunter inside him knows this is what Ciel desires of him in his deepest of selves, but as a butler he cannot rationalize it nor paint it professionally. Given no appropriate alternative, he turns on his heel and slides from the room like a shadow, mind made. 

In the kitchen he works as God does, pulling beauty from absence with hands like hummingbirds. Flour billows around him like smoke, rising and settling and rising again as he whisks himself across the cutting board, from the sink, into the pantry, back again. Eggs crack in a blur, slipping down snowy mountains of sugar only to be whipped into a satin batter with streaks of cocoa like ink. With bare hands he fashions an oppressive heat, for the oven is not fast enough. 

Finally, Sebastian has a cake. Three-tiered and German chocolate, garnished in sliced strawberries and dusted with powdered sugar. In the dining room he arranges Phantomhive’s best silver, and fills a porcelain urn with Ciel’s favorite lilies from the garden. Then, in a flourish of black feathers and tailcoats, he arrives again at his master’s bedroom. 

Ciel holds his limbs stiffly, unenthused and stubborn as Sebastian dresses him, gaze fixed crossly on the window with its drawn blinds like lips pulled tight over a gaping mouth. Sebastian says nothing, swiftly tugging sheer stockings up slender legs and attaching them to the garter clips, head bent between the knees of his master. Then he stands to comb Ciel’s hair neatly, smoothing the mussed bits on the left side where he rubs his cheek into the pillow as he dreams. All the while Ciel pretends he is not there, eyes shifty and downcast. 

Once Ciel is dressed together they descends the stairs, Sebastian several feet behind him, footsteps careful and cat quiet like he is stalking prey. Ciel does not look any older today, in fact he seems more of a child than ever, wishing desperately for things to be the way they were before the roar of fire and the rain of blood, but knowing with resignation they never will be, never can be. Sebastian can smell the sharp, acrid scent of hopelessness on him like he bathed in it this morning, and it makes his mouth water. 

Ciel stops in his tracks when he sees the spread in the dining room, feet turned out in a delicate splay and eyes wide and blinking. “Sebastian,” he murmurs in a small voice, the word his vocabulary is often reduced to in times of great feeling. “You--?”

“Disobeyed your orders, yes,” Sebastian says, dropping swiftly to his knee before his master like a sinner pleading for absolution. “Forgive me,” he rises to his feet, only to be nearly doubled over again as the Earl of Phantomhive, burdened with the weight of eleven years, collides into Sebastian’s midsection, arms thrown tight around his waist. 

He stands, paralyzed as Ciel rubs his face into his double-breasted waistcoat. After a passing moment of shock he forces his hands to move, sliding them up the impossible satin of Ciel’s neck to card fingers through his hair, holding him there, holding him. The dusky perfume of hopelessness ebbs then shifts, growing shades darker and more terrible in Sebastian’s grip. Ciel Phantomhive now smells corrupt with love, the most perilous breed of hopelessness Sebastian knows, and the weight of that realization sends needles of pain into his chest so suddenly he must bite back a gasp. He closes his eyes, drops his head, and buries his lips in Ciel’s hair, raking nails down his back in a pantomime of such things which occur in darkness. 

\----

In addition to chess, Sebastian teaches Ciel how to play darts and billiards, and how to shoot a pistol at close range. He is surprisingly talented at the latter, eyes narrowed shrewdly at the target as Sebastian stands behind him, gloved hands gently stabilizing his arms, chin resting upon a narrow shoulder. He covers Ciel’s ears when he fires and absorbs the recall as it snaps through his little body. 

“Beautiful,” He murmurs, smugly admiring the demolished target. “The young master is a natural marksman.” 

Ciel smirks, handing the smoking handgun to Sebastian, who bows neatly and takes it from him. “Tomorrow can I shoot more?” He asks, ruddy cheeked and tousle-headed. Sebastian fondly smooths the flyaway hairs, tucks them behind Ciel’s ears and combs through his bangs. Ciel lets him, though lately he has begun refusing or shrugging out from under Sebastian’s touch if there is someone nearby to observe, as though newfound pride and shame accompanied his eleventh year. Sebastian does not mind, so long as the Earl still allows contact in darkness, behind locked doors. 

“I think any further target practice would be a waste of bullets,” Sebastian offers, head cocked in amusement. During their tutoring sessions, the power will shift ever so slightly in Sebastian’s favor, and Ciel will sometimes ask things of him as if he were his parent, his father. Though Sebastian is not terribly good at identifying or naming nuance among the fathomless depth of feeling Ciel carves into him, he knows that it makes him feel _something_ , something akin to warmth, to cunning. He rests a palm on Ciel’s shoulder as they begin their return-path from the garden. 

“If I were to see a monster, you think I would shoot it?” Ciel asks. 

“If it were a very large, near, and stationary monster, perhaps,” Sebastian teases. Predictably, Ciel twists out from underneath the hand on his shoulder in response, trotting ahead a few steps so that he can throw a glare behind him at his butler. Sebastian smiles. “On the contrary, I think that with a little more experience you could shoot any number of monsters of a variety of sizes and speeds. Especially human monsters.” 

Ciel grins smugly, though it is a fleeting expression and disappears soon after it arrives, replaced with his customary pout. “I assume those will be the sort which end up dead by my gun anyhow,” he muses. Then, he takes his tiny, black-gloved hands and clasps them together in front of him, arms and index fingers extended to mimic the barrel of a pistol. He squints at an imaginary human target with his one unobscured eye, then pulls an imaginary trigger. “How long do you think it will be, Sebastian?” He asks. 

“How long until what?” Sebastian inquires, although he knows very well what Ciel is referring to, and his heart leaps to think of it. He imagines ascending the summit of bodies laid waste by his young master, he imagines laying his fragile prize out atop the peak of it, holding those bird bones beneath him as he kisses Ciel’s soul from blue, frozen lips. He imagines this day often, though he is quite content to luxuriate in the time spent weaving and spinning the fiber of Ciel’s soul to perfection. 

“Until they come back for me,” Ciel elaborates. “And you help me bring them to their knees.” 

Sebastian tongues over his fangs, moved to momentary silence by Ciel’s stark, vivid picture of his own vengeance. He wonders how much of the detail concerning that final scene has been imbrued into Ciel by his own hellish influence, and how much of it was there to begin with, a seed he tended with black palms and fertile kisses, but did not sow. He supposes it does not matter, because regardless it is there, it is there and growing and twisting, shutting out the light. He swallows a thick mouthful of saliva and inhales deeply, watching as Ciel kicks a stone off the path and sends it skittering into the shrubbery, inciting a flock of thrushes to take off frantic flight. “I fear I do not know, young master. It could be tomorrow, or it could be years from now. All we can do is remain prepared, and ever-watchful.” 

Ciel nods decidedly. “And when they do come, I will be ready,” he asserts, ascending the curved staircase towards the manor’s massive double doors which stand gaping and terrible like the third-eye upon Vishnu’s brow as Sebastian opens them. Sebastian has never asked why, but Ciel prefers to enter and exit the manor through the front doors, despite the numerous other and often more conveniently located entrances. Despite the reason, Sebastian follows dutifully, satisfied to endure the prolonged journey if it is what his master wishes. It’s his job to make Ciel’s youthful, foolish desires a reality, to follow wherever this procession leads. “You will be ready, and so will I,” he says, bowing low as the Earl of Phantomhive crosses the threshold. 

Capering ahead of Sebastian and into the expansive foyer, Ciel looks more boyish and young than ever, a bounce in his step belying his true age, his boundless energy, the sugar he dumped into his tea this morning while Sebastian pretended not to look. Few things bring out this side of Ciel, but the hot, exhilarating metal of his father’s antique dueling pistol seems to be among them. He is often vitalized and animated after their shooting sessions, pushing experimentally against the unspoken set of rules Sebastian enforces as his butler, challenging bed times and dinner portions, allowing his basic etiquette to fall to the wayside in favor of devilry. As a devil himself, these episodes charm Sebastian more than they exasperate him. He finds himself pushing in return, taking Ciel’s roguish temper and running with it, fanning its flames with soft, hot breath. 

“What now, young master?” Sebastian inquires. 

Ciel whips around to eye him suspiciously, complexion still flushed and sweat-damp from the sun. “You’re asking _me_? Don’t you have a strict schedule we must adhere to, _butler_?” He says snidely, eyes narrowed. 

Sebastian’s insides reel in delight. “Yes, most often that is the case. However, today permits some flexibility. And _you_ are the master, after all. You can decide upon our next course of action.” 

Because the Earl of Phantomhive is but eleven years old and only used to giving either the pettiest of orders or the very grandest, this middle-ground type of leadership is somewhat elusive to him. He stands, staring, mind visibly mulling over all the possible courses he could steer the next hour or so. To gently prod him in the desired direction, Sebastian prompts, “If you could do anything at all, permitted it does not ruin your upcoming dinner which I strongly doubt you want to skip, what would be it?” 

It is a huge question for a child, but Ciel does not back down from any challenge, and certainly not when he’s in such a state. He sets his jaw defiantly, crosses his arms and asks, “Anything? Even if it is a waste of bullets?” 

Sebastian almost laughs, but he does not trust the sound to emerge from him and still seem human, so he swallows it, the tips of his incisors digging into his lower lip as he suppresses smile. “Oh dear. I suppose did say _anything_ ,” he says, forcing a sympathetic slant to his brows. 

“I want to continue to practice shooting,” Ciel declares, eye twinkling like pale blue fire. “And I want to try with more difficult targets...moving targets,” he says carefully. Sebastian suspects he nearly said _alive_ targets, but realized that alive targets would not remain alive for very long if he got his wish. _Practice shooting _and _practice killing_ are not worlds apart from one another, but seem so very different than _killing_ itself, to a child. Perhaps even to a human. If Sebastian knows anything of humanity, it is their wild, reckless, beautiful hypocrisy. __

__“Moving targets,” Sebastian repeats, idly rubbing at his chin with his thumb and index finger. “How about we start with targets further away?”_ _

__“Fine,” Ciel settles. “Then moving targets.”_ _

__Sebastian wants to give Ciel what he desires, he wants to grant every dark wish and push deeper, further still until he uncovers darker wishes and grants those as well. He wants to pull Ciel’s loose threads until he frays, comes apart into an unbound armful of string only Sebastian can weave into a web once again. He nods.“Very well.”_ _


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little short, just one section instead of two. I felt kind of like this one needed to stand on its own. Thank you SO MUCH to all of you who are commenting, leaving kudos, and creating fanmixes for this story! I am so thrilled by the response this has warranted. I hope you continue to enjoy!

Outside the sun is beginning to set, casting the garden in a bruised pink, dusky and mauve-tinted with twilight. Sebastian stands beneath the rose archway, removing his waistcoat and laying it carefully upon the hedge before rolling each of his sleeves up to the elbow. Ciel watches from yards away, arms outstretched and hands shaking. “What do I do when it recoils?” he calls across the distance, a note of uncertainty making his voice waver. 

“Brace your feet firmly, but do not lock your knees. The shock will absorb through your arms and shoulders but staying grounded will help. Now. You want to aim here,” he explains, gesturing to his own lean chest with both hands. “The ribs can deflect bullets, but it is a broader target than the head, though just as often fatal. Ideally, shoot to kill. Young master, are you ready?” 

Though poised with his finger on the trigger and his feet braced an appropriate width apart, Ciel does not look ready. Regardless, a firm “yes,” grinds out between his teeth. He fires.

The recoil takes him by surprise and throws him slightly backwards, making the trajectory of his shot swing towards the sunset. Sebastian reaches above his head to grab the bullet at it sails above his head, snapping it from the sky like a magpie after a glint of silver. He holds his palm out, the bullet resting in the center of his glove. 

“That wasn’t even _close_ ,” Ciel complains, hands still visibly tremulous. “You’re too far away.” 

“Nonsense,” Sebastian says, sliding the hot bullet into the pocket of his vest. “It was your first shot without me there to stabilize your arms. Now you know what to expect. Try again.” 

Ciel sighs, pushing off his eyepatch and dropping it to the pebbled earth before raising the pistol, squinting hard with two eyes, one newly ignited with violet flame. Sebastian’s heart tightens and he thinks about fraying hems, about breaking things down only to build them back up again as only he knows how. Ciel fires again, steadier this time. Sebastian catches the bullet inches from his own throat, where it would have torn a searing pathway through his jugular had he allowed it to. “Wonderful,” he calls to his master, pocketing the still smoking metal, impressed. “That one would have surely drawn blood.” 

“He would have fallen at least, correct? It would have slowed him down?” Ciel asks, nearly vibrating with the thrill of this game, cheeks a violent red as he shifts his weight onto the balls of his feet and back again. 

“Undoubtably,” Sebastian tells him. “Then you could have come closer, and shot him in the heart, ending it. Well done, young master.” 

“I want to do more,” Ciel announces. “Until I can fell a man in one shot.”

Sebastian obliges, catching bullet after bullet as the sun drops lower and lower behind them, casting the garden in a deep, erie blue just before the night swallows everything whole. Even in the dwindling daylight Ciel is a surprisingly precise marksman, catching Sebastian in the left breast more than once, and in the gut more often than not. He becomes more bold and comfortable as their deathly charade continues, the pistol growing loose and easily manipulable in his sweat-soft palms as he loads and reloads the barrel for each new round of shots, the weight of it a deep ache in his shoulders rather than acutely straining his stiff wrists as he learns to take the recoil. Sebastian observes with a profound captivation, wondering how far Ciel will go, how deep he will sink, how much blackness he can coax from this weeping wound of a boy and into his own waiting mouth. 

“One more shot, my lord,” He tells him. “Then we must retire in time for dinner. Make this one count.” 

The very tip of Ciel’s pink and perfect tongue is poking from his lips as he narrows his eyes at the target, gaze fixed directly upon Sebastian’s heart, invisible but with his own name etched onto it one hundred times over where it lies hidden in his butler’s ribcage. He squeezes the trigger, and the bullet cuts into the night. 

Sebastian allows it to tear through him. First through his tailored wool vest and dress shirt, and then deeper, the whorled fibers of his pectoral muscle, through sinew and membrane until it shatters through his scapula and out onto the ground behind him in a spectacular rooster-tail of blood. Though it misses his heart, he still falls to the earth on his back, mind white-hot with an unfathomable pain. _Interesting_ , he thinks, stunned by the pure, crystalline agony of it all throbbing brilliantly for a moment before it begins to fade, the demon blackness already beginning to reassemble the broken parts. 

He hears the pistol clatter to Ciel’s feet as he drops it. Then the crunch of clumsy shoes sprinting across gravel as the young master hurtles towards him, skidding to a halt and plunging earthward, hands and knees splattering in blood . “Sebastian!” he screams, and that, _that_ is true agony, that is the purest pain. It rips from his throat like a shipwreck, raw and blood-speckled as he collapses atop Sebastian, one knee braced on either side of his waist as he bends over him, a prayer position, a sickening curl of atonement. “Sebastian,” he wails, fisting the stiff collar of his shirt, smudging the fine white of it with a coppery handprint of blood. “Please!” he implores of silence. “Please. I didn’t...please.” 

Sebastian opens an eye, a single glint of garnet in the darkness. Then he reaches up stiffly, encircling Ciel’s delicate wrist with one hand and sliding the other up behind his neck and into his hair. Even with the stench of blood so rich and metallic about them, he can smell Ciel’s boyish sweat, his fear, his _love_ , fierce and exquisite as he pulls the tiny body towards him. They stay like that for a moment, Ciel wide-eyed and paralyzed, Sebastian bleeding into a pool around them, ever extending like a halo. Their faces are so very close Sebastian can taste Ciel’s stuttering, fear-sweet breaths. “Young master,” he murmurs, thumbing back and forth over Ciel’s lower lip, then hooking his index finger inside the lower ridge of his neat white teeth so that he can draw him closer. “I am here.” 

Ciel’s face crumples, eyes spilling over, hot and angry, as Sebastian cranes his neck upward to lick the salt from his cheeks. “My little lord,” he breathes, smoothing his other hand up Ciel’s shoulder and down his back so that he can rake up under a bloodstained overcoat and untuck his shirt, a desperate, want-mad search for skin. “You must remember I belong only to you. I am going nowhere. You are my master and I am your faithful servant, I am going _nowhere_.” 

Then, with his finger still inside Ciel’s mouth, Sebastian pulls him ever-closer, and fits their lips together. 

At first Ciel does nothing, just hangs heaving and shuddering above Sebastian, mouth wet and impossibly soft where it trembles against him, otherwise stunned and unmoving. Sebastian smoothes the tip of his finger over the underside of his small, slippery tongue before he slides it out completely, wiping Ciel’s own spit up his cheek, into his tears. Then he replaces his finger with his own tongue, licking easily into slick, salty heat. Ciel whines wordlessly as his mouth is filled, too hot and too wet and utterly terrifying, but also unbelievable, all the warmth and smoothness in the entire world suddenly right here, inside of him. Instinctually, he sucks on Sebastian’s tongue, just as he often sucks the honey from his tea spoons, as he sucked the chocolate frosting of his birthday cake from his own fingers. Sebastian makes an inhuman sound, and he sucks that down, too. 

“Nowhere,” Sebastian hisses mindlessly as he releases Ciel’s swollen lips for a moment. They shine in the dark, and he kisses the shine away, moved by the way Ciel is stuck, lost, startled by this all, still shuddering with tears and the relief of Sebastian rising from his grave. 

Almost entirely healed from his bullet wound now, Sebastian curls his arm around Ciel’s back and scoops him up, rolling him over and laying him out onto the gravel pathway, into the black pool of his own blood. There, with one hand steady upon his gasping chest and the other cradling his head, Sebastian kisses his master’s slack and pliant mouth until it further relents beneath him. He kisses and he kisses, until Ciel begins to kiss back, tiny, confused tugs and pulls of his own lips, swipes with his tongue like a kitten lapping cream from a saucer. 

“Blood is a part of killing, too,” Sebastian says breathlessly, taking Ciel’s hand and licking the sticky red patina from his fingers. “There is always blood, and you must realize that, you cannot ignore it or fear it,” he nips at the blue filigree in Ciel’s translucent wrist, then dips to catch his lips again. There are blood handprints all over the formerly white breast of Sebastian’s dress shirt, all over the formerly white skin of Ciel’s bare knees, and secretly, beneath his shorts and up onto his thighs. “There will always be blood, there is blood inside of every person.” 

“And inside every demon?” Ciel murmurs before his mouth is laid claim to again. 

“I cannot speak for every demon,” Sebastian whispers as they part. “But there is blood inside me.” 

The devil kisses the young Earl of Phantomhive until he can do that as well as he can shoot, until the blood cools and darkens, until they both smell of iron and rot.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This document is entitled "little lover, you're in trouble" on my computer, which is a line from the absurd Blaqk Audio song "Say Red" which is about sexual naiveté, and the corruption of youth. Just fyi. Maybe you should listen/dance to it, because it's very danceable, and also contains the glorious line, "put murder back in art!" which I think about a lot. Enjoy the latest chapter!

Their world is tight and claustrophobic, although the manor Sebastian rebuilt echoes in its mammoth emptiness. Here in the green rolling country outside of London, the Phantomhive estate is isolated, allowed to grow twisted and savage without the society’s trellis to shape it. It is Sebastian’s quiet guidance by which it flourishes, Sebastian’s long pale fingers and black-taloned hands by which it is sculpted. The manor, the grounds surrounding it, and the boy inside, have all been fashioned by the profound, abiding love of a demon. 

As a result, the rules are different behind Phantomhive walls. The name Phantomhive grows beyond its constraints, a word which means safety but also means death, which means absolution, eternity, the most noble and civilized lawlessness. A paradox. Ciel Phantomhive, at eleven years and some months, is a man by some definitions, a child by others. A ruthless, feral beast regardless, a king. It is what Sebastian has made him into. It is the garden Sebastian will continue to tend. 

It is night, and Sebastian puts his garden to a bed in a blanket soil, untying his eye patch and placing it neatly upon the bedside, tucking the tiny warm body into freshly-cleaned sheets. The stars multiply outside, wax weeping down the length of the flickering candles upon Ciel’s dresser. Together, they combine to make the only light. 

Ciel frees a leg from the blankets and as Sebastian bends to fluff his pillows, and swiftly kicks his foot up so that it rests just at Sebastian’s throat, his metatarsal pressing gently into a thrumming pulse. He wiggles his toes, eyes darkening as he narrows them. “I have a blister on my heel,” he declares. 

Sebastian smiles, hands rising to close over Ciel’s narrow calf, lifting the small pale foot from his neck and kissing the arch with a fleeting brush of his lips. He bends Ciel’s knee and sits down beside him on the edge of the bed, cradling his foot and examining it with exaggerated prudence. “I see,” he says, rubbing over a tender pink spot just below the tuck of Ciel’s delicate achilles. It is nothing, a mere scuff from the new boots Ciel has yet to break in, something to use as an excuse, a gambit to draw Sebastian’s hands to his skin, then under it. “What does the young master suggest I do about it?” Sebastian asks with a playful inflection to his voice, running the tip of his index finger back and forth over the puckered skin, watching Ciel wince exquisitely at the sting. 

Ciel shrugs, flexing his foot against Sebastian’s forearm.“Make me feel better.” 

A terrific wreath of thorns blooms inside of Sebastian, pricking his heart, his intestines, filling him with the fluttering heat of internal bleeding. It’s difficult for him to ascertain whether or not Ciel fully understands the implication of his words, of the things Sebastian has taught him to thirst for and ask of his butler. Their dynamic is something which exists only behind the walls of the Phantomhive manor, born from darkness and in isolation. Therefore it could thrive as its own sickness, uncontaminated by London, by language, by anything save for Ciel’s own hungry loneliness and Sebastian’s fathomless desire to fill his master’s every vacancy. 

“Very well,” Sebastian murmurs, pulling off one of his gloves with his teeth, eyes fixed on Ciel’s wide, unashamed blue eyes. His curiosity shines back, holding Sebastian’s reflection within it like a buoy at sea. Sebastian uses his bare hand to knead gently into his arch, up his calf, and further still past his knee, beneath the hem of his night shirt where so much more skin lies, silky and hidden. Ciel settles back into his throne of snowy pillows, parting his legs to allow Sebastian purchase, eyelids fluttering and cheeks flushing every so slightly, like dawn-light breaking over a white-capped ocean. He slides his foot higher, past the crook of Sebastian’s bent elbow and towards his torso, where he braces against the thud of Sebastian’s heartbeat.

There is no compass, no north star, no aurora borealis by which the Earl of Phantomhive can chart his morality. There are only constellations he cannot yet name, and even then they are lost behind the curtain his butler has long since let fall to conceal the night. It’s too late, for this is already the way he views the world. It already _is_ his world. 

Sebastian thumbs over the very inside of Ciel’s thigh, where the skin is so thin and delicate he can nearly see through it, to the perfect tracery of blue like a map to his interior. It is one of Sebastian’s very favorite places to kiss, a place where he can draw dark, hectic marks to the surface without much pain or labor. Ciel gasps and shudders, eyes still fixed unwaveringly to Sebastian’s, the muscles in his legs twitching involuntarily as they gather and tense beneath Sebastian’s palm. “Is this better?” Sebastian asks. 

Ciel twitches at his voice, cheeks growing pinker with the thrill of knowing something dangerous is touching him where no one else has touched him before, of being held within the tempered, leashed threat of his dearest toy. A quick and reckless smile splits across his face and his thighs fall apart, spreading himself to Sebastian like the most sinful of banquets. “I suppose so,” he says. “It’s satisfactory.” 

“Only satisfactory?” Sebastian hums, leaning forward and taking Ciel’s foot in his free hand before propping it up on his shoulder, further exposing his inner thighs and their collection of bite-marks, the pinch of so many fanged incisors like a tattoo of boundless devotion. “That will simply not do. A Phantomhive butler must be _exemplary_. My master’s mere satisfaction is a failure, I’m afraid.” He dips down, mouthing along the inside of Ciel’s bony knee. 

“Then please get on with it,” Ciel orders curtly, tangling his toes in the oil-slick softness of Sebastian’s hair, snagging and pulling. He probably does not even have a word for what _it_ is, _it_ is merely something he longs for, something Sebastian does to him, something which feels so good it makes his vision white-out, makes him fall to pieces and wail as if waking from a nightmare. Sebastian loves that the least innocent of things is what is preserving the final shard of Ciel’s innocence. Another, lovely paradox. 

“As you wish,” Sebastian murmurs. He holds him apart, bending weak bones beneath the force of hell. Ciel would be so easy to fracture, to rupture, so Sebastian handles him gently even when he is intentionally splitting his seams, bruising his delicate skin so that he can look upon it tomorrow and know the Earl of Phantomhive is his. 

Ciel grows still beneath him for a moment, letting out a high, hissing whine as Sebastian touches him where he’s hot and hard and twitching. Sebastian sometimes feels like he could be sustained by the sounds Ciel makes alone, so naive and reflexive, so pure and animal. He works these sounds out of his master, fingers over ivory as if he is a pianist, mouth blowing glass into great, silver parisons until Ciel does not know where he begins and ends, what is his own skin and what is molten iron. He arches and twists as he reaches his melting point, an elegant parabola over the bed for a moment before he is drawn tight and linear up into Sebastian’s mouth. He makes a solitary sound, one instrumental mourning cry, and then he collapses into broad palms, shuddering and shaking like a fallen leaf. 

Sebastian lets him go, wipes his mouth upon the back of his remaining glove. Then he watches the fragments reassemble in the eye of the storm, Ciel pink and pinned and panting, the most beautiful rose in the whole of his garden. “Satisfactory, or exemplary?” He asks, moved to wisps of escaping darkness by the clean, salty, sweat and boy taste lingering upon his tongue. He thumbs over the swollen slickness between Ciel’s creamy thighs, watches with agonizing wonder as his body snaps and reels with oversensitivity bordering on pain. He can take so little, but still, he takes it, takes it and takes it again. 

Ciel doesn’t say anything, just lays there and tries to breath. Sebastian complicates the struggle by forcing three of his wet fingers into Ciel’s mouth to suck on. It is something Ciel does naturally and easily, nursing whatever Sebastian edges past his lips. Another terrific and astonishing corner in Ciel’s never-ending maze of innate darkness. He chokes just before Sebastian withdraws his fingers, gasping as Sebastian licks up the thick, translucent spit which bubbles up over his chin from having his gag reflex provoked. His eyes flutter open, cheeks dusted in red as he sucks in desperate mouthfuls of air. He watches Sebastian lick his spit from his fingers, eyes wide and watering. He knows nothing else. Phantomhive is a vine which has grown around the fist of hell, this it the shape in which it will stay. 

They lie together in silence, Ciel’s breath now ragged and wheezing as Sebastian rubs his hands idly over his cooling body. Eventually, he clears his throat, eyelids fluttering closed. “Sebastian,” he asks, voice hoarse. “Why do you touch me so much?” 

Sebastian’s palm stills on his soft, boyish stomach. “Because my master orders me to,” he decides upon for its truth and simplicity. 

“Yes,” Ciel agrees, turning his cheek so that his head nods into the crook of Sebastian’s elbow, collecting himself closer. “But you touched be before then. Is it something demons do? Have you done this with all your masters?” 

Sebastian is surprised. His hand convulses closed upon Ciel’s abdomen before smoothing thoughtfully up his chest again. “No. Not all demons, and not all masters. Some, perhaps, but not all. You are a somewhat singular master, and whether or not you order my touch, I would be compelled to do so.”

“Hmm,” Ciel murmurs, limbs growing heavy and twitching as he becomes drowsier against Sebastian, the little king about his empire of thorns, the blackest and loveliest rose. “What makes me singular?” he asks, corner of his mouth quirking up slightly. 

“Your soul,” Sebastian answers, tracing his fingertips over the cruel scar burnt into the back of Ciel’s ribcage, white-pink and shiny like abalone. 

Ciel snaps his sleepy eyes open. The one is terribly blue Sebastian’s breath stops in his throat. “My _soul_? If my soul is what’s special, then why do you touch the rest of me?” he asks, face taut with suspicion. 

“The soul and the body are not so different. They shape one another, like you and I shape one another. Like this body you see is shaped by the images and traits you trust and idealize,” he explains. “I wish to consume your soul, young master, yes. Eventually. But touching your body is not a consolation.” 

Ciel’s forehead wrinkles. “I don’t understand.” 

Of course he doesn’t understand. He is a child, attempting to make sense of something adult, something timeless and immense and inhuman. There is nothing to be done about it. Sebastian thinks, diluting all the complicated vines and blooms of his garden down to a single pathway which leads directly through its deepest center. “I touch you because you want me to, and it is my duty to do as you please. However, I also touch you because I want to.” 

Yawning, Ciel stretches and adjusts so he’s on his side, facing away from Sebastian. “Want. I didn’t know demons wanted. I thought you were too good for that,” he mumbles, soft and limp and warm with sleepiness. 

Sebastian bites back a low chuckle as he smooths Ciel’s soft hair down, carding fingers through it and scratching his scalp. “No,” he tells the moon, which watches them from the window, inching fingers of light between the crack in the curtains as Ciel drifts off beside him. “We are not _too good_ for anything.” Once the Earl of Phantomhive is lost to sleep, Sebastian rises like the tide and disappears out the door, the exhalation of flexing black wings putting the candles out as he leaves. 

\---

As the Ciel’s insides grow blacker and more beautiful, his appearance remains as young and charming as ever: a soft, summer white peach with worms twisting in its pit. Though he is days shy of his half-birthday, his face bears minimal evidence of the time which has passed since Sebastian was first summoned to a marble room seething with human disappointment, and took the hand of the solitary blue diamond amid so much filth and decay. He has grown mere centimeters and even then only in height, there has been no broadening of his shoulders or chest, no dormant muscles twitching to half-taut potential beneath satin skin. He is still losing his baby teeth, tiny, white, almost translucent things like skim milk and seashells; he still makes nothing but noise when he comes. 

Sebastian doesn’t know much about children, but he does know they are not supposed to look so frail and delicate forever. They are supposed to change, that is the beauty of children. They are fleeting and ephemeral, testaments to the fragility of human mortality. He wonders if he’s feeding Ciel enough, if their castle in the hills with its lonely banquet halls and empty ballrooms is keeping him forever one decade old, while a portrait somewhere in the attic ages for him, belying the cancerous black fire Sebastian stokes inside. 

His eyes are so clear and blue, his hands smooth and uncalloused. It’s comical to watch him flick through his mail or read the paper over his morning tea like a man would, and Sebastian often has to cover his smirking lips with a hand to maintain the appearance of propriety in these moments. But then Sebastian will remember the cold ice of his gaze as he peers down the barrel of his pistol, he will remember his strength, his will, his cruelty. He will remember all this and smile the grave smile of adoration, amusement forgotten. 

So perhaps he should not be surprised when letters from the Queen begin to arrive, asking seemingly impossible things of an eleven year old. After all, he is the last remaining soul bearing his family name, and fiercely loyal in his allegiance to that name. He is a Phantomhive before he is a child, although in these letters, her Majesty refers to him as _boy_ more frequently than she refers to him as anything else. It seems absurd to expect a mere _boy_ to infiltrate the criminal underworld and eradicate its threat, it seems absurd address child as a _boy_ and as a _watchdog_ in the same neatly scrawled sentence. It seems especially absurd to do so without knowledge of the devil he holds in his pocket, the knight which would make such feats possible. 

Regardless, the letters begin to change things. They are contact from the outside world, from the city, from the these abstract forces in the human world like _countries_ and _royalty_ which Sebastian will never understand beyond a remedial comprehension. It draws Ciel taller, as if there is an invisible string from the heavens pulling his spine upright. Sebastian watches with curiosity as the Queens letters make his master age before his eyes, as a human disease infiltrates the careful vacuum he has built to hold him. _Interesting_ , he thinks, without resistance. He is not opposed to change. The wind may come and scatter ash, but Sebastian is the fire. He will keep burning, and Ciel will continue to smolder beneath him, until kingdom come.

Anyway, it is likely that some time spent capering about London pursuing Opium dens and prostitution rings to their graves will only sharpen Ciel’s soul, further expose him to every aspect of killing, its dirtiness, its blood. He will inevitably learn the nuance of criminality, the profit of sex, of gambling, of drugs. Things he now only has a depthless, uncomplicated textbook understanding of. Sebastian will intervene when necessary, but he also plans to let Ciel experience discomfort, fear. Anything which will further distort his humanity, coil it around the mark in his eye with its many angles and fiendish points. Ciel can go to the Underworld. He can bark himself hoarse, he can protect the foolish idea of a country, of a name. Sebastian will watch, brows raised over the flash of garnet, and salivate. 

To complete his first mission at the end of the queen’s leash, they take a carriage to London. Ciel holds the her majesty’s letter between his palms, creasing and re-creasing it so many times over the parchment begins to fray and soften in his black gloves, a tattered mess by the time they arrive in the East end. “Are you nervous, young master?” Sebastian asks, helping Ciel down the carriage steps, amazed by the way his shoulders are thrown back, by the unwavering stoicism painted across his smooth cheeks. There is a newness about him, and he smells rich and golden with pride. Sebastian inhales from his own glove after he releases his master’s narrow elbow, lashes fluttering against the white slope of his cheekbone. 

“Don’t be silly,” Ciel snaps. “I have you here. There is no human who could possibly be a fair match for a demon. London is as good as saved.” There is a slight note of mocking in his voice, for he has heard Sebastian talk about how forsaken humanity is and will forever be, the unsalvageable nature of its wickedness. London cannot be saved, and the Queens Watchdog knows this. Sebastian smiles as the carriage rumbles away, leaving them alone in a dimly lit alley.

“Perhaps not London,” Sebastian offers, thinking of so many fallen cities before this, of Babylon, of Sodom and Gomorra. “But you will be saved, come any danger.” 

“And that is why I’m not afraid,” Ciel answers, shooting a fleeting glance over his shoulder at Sebastian, eye a spark of blue fire in the darkness. 

They walk side by side, boots clacking against uneven, crumbling cobblestone, splashing in the occasional foul puddle. The alley smells fetid with garbage, and rats skitter ahead of them from one maggot infested pile of horse shit to the next in search of something edible. Ciel holds a silk handkerchief with his father’s monogram embroidered into it over his mouth and nose and mumbles, “I loathe the city.” He breathes shallowly, then coughs. “To think that there are people who live here.” 

Sebastian smiles, touched by Ciel’s wild and unchecked arrogance. Finally, they come across a door laid into the sweating brick wall to their left, so scuffed and scratched it is almost unrecognizable as such. A crude sign hangs upon it, a symbol carved into the soft, damp wood. Ciel brings the Queens letter up to his nose, studying the image she provided, matching it to the one before them. He looks absolutely ridiculous, even with the maturity he grew overnight, this pale gosling with his incandescent feathers about to storm into some criminal hideaway nestled into this sick old city’s underbelly. Sebastian wants to reach out and run the back of his hand down Ciel’s cheek, to feel the softest skin in this darkest alley. The city holds its breath, and so does Sebastian. 

“I’m ready,” Ciel says, bristling in his jacket, looking for all the world like a lapdog attempting to pass as something much more fearsome. Sebastian nods to him, feels the sweep of a cold, clammy wind behind them. _The scatter of ash_ , he thinks, swelling in the flourish of vast black wings, blotting out the night with his superior darkness. Then, he kicks down the door in one swift and nearly silent motion. Dust rises in plumes before it settles, engulfing them in the sour, dank smell of mildew. The sky throbs with stars, heavy and bearing upon their backs, pushing them into the mystery. 

“After you, my lord,” He says, bowing low. Ciel steps into shadow, standing as tall as he knows how. Sebastian awaits him to be forever changed, trailing behind in his shadow.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is either the chapter you've been waiting for, or the one you've been dreading (or both, if you're anything like me!) Read on for increasingly graphic interactions, here's your warning to turn away if you've only been reading this because it hadn't gone THERE yet. If you've only been reading in hopes that it will go THERE then boldly go forth!! Thank you sooo much to those of you who have taken the time to read, leave kudos, or comment. You are all wonderful.

Following their first foray into the Underworld, Ciel finally seems to Sebastian like a boy rapidly approaching twelve, proud and insolent, soft pale cheeks smudged with the black soot of knowledge. Sebastian imagines pressing his gloved fingers into the charcoal left after a fire and drawing them beneath Ciel’s eyes, leaving ashen half-moons in his wake. He imagines pulling the small frame into his own and fitting it there so that he can feel him grow, yes, _grow_ , with his own skin. He imagines many things as he gently scrubs Ciel’s scarred back in the bath at the Phantomhive London townhouse, gazing fondly through the steam upon the seemingly new span to his shoulders, the potential therein. He traces the brand beneath the wing of Ciel’s shoulder blade as he has many times, the twining shapes like the bodies of two embracing serpents. 

London’s filth has long since been rinsed off into the bath, bits of silt and sadness settling to the bottom of the tub like something forgotten. The mission was, as to be expected, a success. Ciel played his part with shaking hands, and did not flinch when their mark, a fat, sour-mouthed Russian man responsible for kidnapping a handful of young girls and selling them to rich perverts, laughed at him, called him a coward. He did not laugh as Sebastian slew him, he choked spectacularly on his own black, bubbling blood. Ciel stood over him, eyes wide and fascinated, and watched as he sucked in his final wet, staggering inhalation, then released his bladder and bowels all over the packed-dirt floor. Even then, he did not flinch. Sebastian keeps replaying the scene in his head, moved by Ciel’s resolute allure toward violence. 

Without realizing it, he digs his nails into the scar, feels Ciel wince and hiss in his talons. He relents, but only just. “Too hard? I apologize, young master.” 

Wet shoulders shrug in front of him. “It’s fine. It’s just that, even though it’s healed over, it still hurts,” Ciel muses, head bent and eyes closed beneath Sebastian’s touch. “Just like it was yesterday.” 

Sebastian ebbs in pressure, but does not stop. He has long since taught Ciel that pain is not something to fear or flee from, but something to hold onto, something to embrace and feed and flourish in. He uses the black nail on his index finger to gently scratch along the neck of the left-most serpent, and Ciel shivers, shifts back towards it. Seeking pain as he was taught to. “That’s the beauty of hurt, young master,” he observes. “It never truly goes away. It becomes a part of us, drives us, becomes our ambition.” 

“Us?” Ciel asks, half-smiling in a way he sometimes does. “You’re talking like you’re a human.” 

_Or like you are a demon_ , Sebastian thinks, surprised at himself for aligning so closely with this mortal thing he holds and hurts, this incredible, corruptible beast. “Forgive me,” He says. “I only meant all creatures. Pain is a universal language of sorts.” 

“Is it?” Ciel asks, eyes flickering open, surprised. “You feel pain?” He slides his palms down his thighs, which are very pink beneath the sudsy water, flushed several shades darker than the rest of him from the heat. Sebastian stares, transfixed by he infernal flash of white skirting across the burn of red, like doves feathers mired in blood. He does, indeed, feel pain. He _is_ pain, hewn from it, born from it, sustained by it. He feels it right now, the ache of hunger deep within him, a sick and festering splinter fashioned from wanting Ciel Phantomhive. 

“Yes,” He says, because he cannot lie. “But it is not like your pain, or the pain of any human. There is no way for me to describe it to you,” he explains. 

Ciel nods, his contract seal sparking, igniting Sebastian’s hand with a familiar burn. “I see.” 

Sebastian soaps under his arms, across his bony chest and the back of his neck. Then, he has him stand in all his pale dripping glory, a child’s skeleton in its skin of cream pulled tight across it. With wet gloves he scrubs the rest of him, forehead bent close enough that a few strands of his hair adheres to a damp, shivering stomach. The humidity is taut around them, a new tension crackling between their flesh like an electrical current. It is the first time he has looked at Ciel’s skin and known with certainty that Ciel is fully aware of him looking, that Ciel is smoldering under his gaze, conscious of his own power, of his own body. The change strikes up an agony in Sebastian, equal parts thrill and grief. _Pain_ , he thinks. There is no other word for it in this human language he is forced to use as Ciel’s possession.

Ciel trembles in the glow of Sebastian’s craving, wavering like a flame, grappling with this new and terrifying knowledge. Sebastian does not stop; it will change nothing. Ciel refuses back down from pain. The moment crackles, and Sebastian wonders what will happen, if anything will change. 

Eventually, Ciel sinks back down into the bathwater to rinse the slippery sheen of soap from his skin, cheeks a shade darker and eyes lowered demurely. He peers up at Sebastian through his lashes, as if seeing him for the first time, as if he finally understands what it means to be made of flesh. They balance together on the edge of some unnamed precipice, and Sebastian again reaches for the soap, preparing to work a lather into Ciel’s hair. 

“Why do you bathe me with your gloves on?” Ciel asks carefully, reaching out with fingers just beginning to turn white and pucker in the bathwater. “Seems a waste,” he adds. It is almost coy, an attempt at coyness made by someone only just realizing what coyness is. Sebastian hurts and hurts, and it is such a perfect thing to feel. 

“You told me once that a butler must bathe his master wearing gloves. That it was disrespectful to touch his master’s skin with his own,” Sebastian reminds him.

Ciel’s cheeks color yet again. “ _I_ said that?” He visibly mulls over the absurdity of such a thing, as Sebastian has touched him many times in far more intimate circumstances with two bare hands. He has been worked to smoothness by Sebastian’s palms, molded like clay into the shape he holds now. He has been wrought and wrecked and wounded in Sebastian’s hands, so to be _bathed_ seems like nothing but a whisper. 

“You did,” Sebastian affirms. “When you were just a boy.” He says, as if Ciel is not still just a boy.

Ciel shakes his head. “Well now I have decided that’s foolish, since it forces you to launder more gloves than necessary. Sebastian, I order you to remove your gloves when you bathe me, starting this evening.” The last of it comes out with chilling conviction, ice-blue eyes locked onto Sebastian’s, frozen over a whole sea of suggestion churning beneath. 

“Yes, my lord,” Sebastian says evenly, though insides thrash and coil and fight as says it. With much restraint, he peels the wet and clinging fabric from his hands, watching Ciel watch him, watching the dawn break over a new horizon. 

Ciel settles back into the water, clumsy and glorious in the way all young bodies are when they know they are on display. Sebastian reaches for the dark, wet slate of Ciel’s hair, kneading his scalp, slicking the lather through his palms a his eyes rove over Ciel’s flushed torso, further down into the water where things are half concealed. It feels so very different to look at Ciel this way, with his innocence a fractured thing, allowing for darkness to seep between the cracks. It makes Sebastian sick with longing, and he thinks of Ciel crouched low on the floor, leaning over a blood-speckled corpse in London; he thinks of standing behind him, holding young eyes open with gloved fingers. 

\--

Once Ciel is rinsed and dried and dressed in his bedclothes, he decides he is retiring early to sleep. “Killing vermin is quite exhausting,” He says through a feigned yawn. “Just being _here_ in this awful city with this awful noise is exhausting. Sebastian. Please.” 

Sebastian nods and follows his master down the hallway, just as he will follow him everywhere, anywhere. He can smell Ciel’s nerves radiating from his newly clean body in undulating waves, wild and potent like an oncoming tempest. He knows what is to pass, a knowledge born from centuries spent awaiting a few, scattered moments of transcendence. 

The second they reach Ciel’s room, stark and sterile in the seldom used townhouse, Sebastian blows out the candles so that they are both swallowed by sudden and unfamiliar night. A small, surprised sound escapes Ciel’s lips, which allows Sebastian to find them in the dark. 

The tempest cracks and thunders over the skyline, rushing forth from Ciel in swells, in gusts. Sebastian holds him as he breaks and breaks, mouth parted wide to inhale each searing surge of the sea, hands tangled in his still damp hair as the gale of it all slams their twined bodies into the footboard of the bed. Ciel claws back at him, arching and twisting with newfound intent as they tumble into the neat, pressed blankets. Sebastian drags his hands down Ciel’s sides to feel the erratic expanding of his ribcage, and their eyes lock like some ancient mechanism. For the first time since Sebastian began teaching the young master this game, it feels like Ciel is doing more than just holding on and allowing the current to take him where it will. 

Ciel touches him, terrified and exploratory. For months, for a _year_ his hands have been clutched desperately into tight fists, over Sebastian’s shoulders, his waistcoat lapels, his hair, the sheets. Anything to anchor him amid the swelling rage of sensation. Now his pale fingers skitter over Sebastian’s neck in the dark, sliding beneath his collar to seek the heat trapped beneath, eyes wide like he is just realizing that Sebastian has skin, too. That he is not the _only_ one condemned to this confusing prison of flesh. 

There is a flutter of wings in the darkness, like a great blanket of silence settling upon the earth, trapping things to rot beneath it. Ciel keeps struggling against Sebastian, fighting his weight so that he can work his hands up under his dress shirt, over flat and flickering planes of muscle. Sebastian burns his palms, almost too hot to touch, but still, he does it. 

Sebastian breathes in wild, ragged breaths, stunned to an enraged and smoldering slowness by himself. _How can you do this to me?_ he mourns, sobbing and mouthing over such a terrified, impossible pulse. _How can one decade and some months undo centuries, unravel the seams of the devil? How, after so long?_

Ripping himself from the agony of being touched, he rolls panting onto his back. Ciel follows him, straddling the breadth of his stomach, just below the heaving jut of his ribcage. Though Ciel weighs close to nothing, Sebastian aches to breath beneath his weight, cutting his hips up into the air above him as he thrusts mindlessly into nothingness. Maybe it’s not breathing that aches, maybe it’s everything else. Blackness unspools from him and he does not even have the mind to reel it back in. 

Ciel perches atop him, rutting and riding in jerking, graceless bucks. His eyes are flint-black with pupil, save for the caustic bite of lilac blazing like sunlight as he stares down at Sebastian with wet, open-mouthed thrill. He is excited and frightened by his own fierce power, the trenchant brilliance of it as he floors the devil, holds his knight pinned to the bed. “Sebastian,” he whispers, sliding his palms over his chest and up to his throat, where they convulse and tighten as he plays God. “Does it feel good?” 

“Young master,” Sebastian answers thickly, closing his fingers into fists over the willow-thin of Ciel’s forearms. “Like nothing has ever felt before this.” 

It is a grand and terrible admission, for Ciel is eleven years old and cannot fathom being the most sublime thing in all of history. He says nothing, just flushes blood red and rocks his hips with senseless abandon, seeking friction, testing the limits of his control, his unthinkable power over hell. 

Sebastian watches him through a fevered haze, sees a decisive expression set into his features as he sits upright, reaching tentatively behind him with an open palm to ghost his fingers over the tented fabric between Sebastian’s legs. The touch is so light it is almost nothing at all, just the brush of small, soft fingers, tracing experimentally over an unfamiliar contour. Sebastian holds his breath, stills against the bed. Then, growing more curious, Ciel begins to squeeze, to rub, clumsy and uncertain and beautiful in his inexperience. Sebastian cannot remember the last time, if there ever was such a time, he felt so damned to blindness. 

Ciel’s hand skirts over the hot straining crown, smearing the inside Sebastian’s trousers with slickness as his body twitches and weeps. Lost in wild, incendiary ripples of static, Sebastian throws his head back, arching his hips up off the mattress into the small warm palm like there is nothing but this in the whole wretched human empire. 

“Does it hurt?” Ciel asks in the small voice, withdrawing his fingers to feel the soft skin of Sebastian’s abdomen, the valley between two ridges of muscle, dusted in fine dark hair like ash upon snow. 

When Sebastian laughs there is nothing human in it, it sounds like shattering glass, like wind tearing through wet leaves, the crackling of a funeral pyre. Sebastian feels the quickening of Ciel’s heart resonate through his body, chills raising the tender pale skin of his thighs as he pushes himself against Sebastian’s solidity, like his fear makes him hungry. Finding his voice in the night, Sebastian tells him, “Yes.” 

“Should I stop?” He whispers, though his fingers do not cease their clumsy stroke. 

“What have I taught you about the beauty of hurt?” Sebastian asks him, reaching around Ciel’s body to unbutton his own trousers, giving Ciel more room to slide a searching hand beneath the waistband, to the dark, damp, heated secrecy there between his thighs.

“That it’s a part of us? That we shouldn’t run--” Ciel murmurs, though his voice trails off into a strangled gasp as he touches Sebastian for the first time, stung silent by the impossible heat, the steel-hardness. “Oh,” he says then, grinding deep into Sebastian as he feels the pulsing wetness beading at the tip, the slide of sin-soft skin over inconceivable rigidity. Sebastian tries in vain to keep his hips steady, to not thrust up into his touch with force set to break. Everything feels too radiant to be contained in this form, to be contained in this room, this world. He keeps breathing, and it keeps aching. 

Ciel twists off of his perch, shifting so that he’s beside Sebastian, face centimeters from the exploratory path of his hand. He stares and stares with narrowed eyes and a slack mouth, at his pale fingers which cannot even begin to encircle such thickness. Again, he asks, “does it hurt?” dipping the tip of his index finger into a clear honeyed bead of stickiness at the slit, pulling it into a thin shivering thread until is breaks.

Sebastian watches him through chaos, head lolling across the sheets. He cannot answer for he can’t find his voice, he only swallows thickly, reaching out with one heavy hand so that he can gently smooth the hair away from Ciel’s brow, needing desperately to look at him, to hold those clear blue eyes open and watch the spreading stain. 

Ciel drifts closer as if driven by some deep instinct, opening pink wet lips swollen from kissing, swollen from teeth. Then he slides his shining his mouth over the head, swirling the tip of his tongue to collect everything he has wrought to the surface, lips closing to fit just under the ridge. His eyes flutter closed, like it is so easy.

He sucks, opening his mouth further to accommodate what he can though anything past the first several centimeters or so is a stretch. His eyes scrunch shut and water as he reaches his limit quickly, for he is small and Sebastian is not. There is no show, no performance, nothing but curiosity and pure, untarnished want, and while his mouth slips and works he ruts his own hips against the bed, mewling involuntarily at the satin feel of it all. 

Sebastian has seen the Nile River and the North Sea. Flash floods, tsunamis, the most tremendous rainstorms in all of human history and the history before that. Sebastian has drowned, and Sebastian has swam, yet _nothing_ on earth or in hell has felt as wet as the Earl of Phantomhive’s mouth. He makes a fist in Ciel’s hair, arm tensing and spasming in paroxysms of restraint as he tries in vain to keep himself from pushing that mouth down the remaining length and choking him. 

Ciel sputters around his burning mouthful, lashing his tongue as he froths and drools, struggles to breathe through his nose as his mouth is rendered useless. But he does not stop, does not back down in the face of pain, he never does, he cannot. He rubs himself like a dog into the still-made bed, hands sliding up white heat, slicked with his own saliva, the drip of his running nose. 

Sebastian comes. Empties himself, one long and glorious snap of his lean body like a whip cracking, filling the Earl of Phantomhive so thoroughly there is excess to bubble over, spilling from Ciel’s bruised lips in white viscous mouthfuls. It feels like the whole of the night sky expanding and detonating inside of him, like he is full to the brim with a universe of stars. He cannot see they the are condensed so tightly, there is nothing but too-bright light, burning him out so that he is but dust, eddies of blackness, so very obviously inhuman in the hands of this tiny, unimaginable child. _How_ he thinks on a loop, until the word has no meaning at all. 

Sound returns gradually to the room, and the ringing in Sebastian’s ears fades, gives way to staggering breath and two wild heartbeats. Ciel coughs and coughs, red-faced and wheezing, adhered to Sebastian’s flesh by a thick string of clear spit. Still beside himself he slides his mouth down the twitching shaft, licking away what he choked back up, feeling the tiny aftershock with his lips, his chin, his cheek. _Remarkable_ , Sebastian thinks, wincing at the overwhelm. And again, inescapably, _how?_

Sebastian’s hand shakes at he smooths Ciel’s hair away from his damp brow. “Young Master,” he whispers, with nothing before or after it. He thumbs over his swollen lower lip, slick with come and saliva, then pushes past it to touch his teeth, the delicate ridges on the roof of his mouth. Ciel’s eyes are hazy with adoration, a blue so full of pupil it is nearly black, the midnight of his family ring. 

Ciel’s voice is hoarse as he scrapes out, “Your gloves are still on.” 

Sebastian’s eyes flash in the darkness, and he tongues his pointed incisors, counting all the ways in which they are still different. “You would like me to remove them?” 

Ciel crawls up the bed on his stomach, his hips continuing to pump and shift long after he has reached the cage of Sebastian’s arms. There, he pulls the gloves off himself, and places those hands and their vast impossible span upon his own depraved body. He closes his eyes, and lets Sebastian touch him.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. This chapter is stupidly long; I struggled a lot with the second half of it. I apologize for any awkwardness that might ensue from that struggle. 
> 
> 2\. Apparently among Japanese school children, eyeball-licking is like the equivalent to "second base" and a common followup to kissing. The trend often results in school-wide pink eye break outs. For some reason I find the idea of this a huge turn on? (Not kids with pink-eye, but the normalizing of eyeball-licking). I know it's weird. I have never actually licked an eyeball or had my eyeball licked, seeing as I don't fancy getting conjunctivitis, but I can imagine it with stark clarity. I don't think I'd like it, but the idea of it? I like that a lot.

Sebastian cannot remember the last time he slept, if there ever was such a time. He knows he has tried, made attempts to pass the endless stretch of years when the world grew too dull to endure, but he never truly succeeded in submitting to that death before death. 

This is why it is miraculous that tonight, Sebastian sleeps. Sleeps for hours, drops below the surface and follows his master into the dark. It’s an unexpected thing, an accident, and when he wakes the world seems to have somehow changed in his absence, this mysterious shift occurring in the time he spent dreaming, like he lost a fraction of himself to that strange and hidden realm beyond the curtain. 

With impossibly heavy limbs and a suffocating heat upon his chest, Sebastian slides into slow, muddled consciousness, rising from a fading mess of fragmented images. The curve of Ciel’s cheek like a summer-flushed moon, a handful of Ciel’s hair twisting like mercury through his own fingers. Everything he has ever felt or longed to feel distilled down to the infernal slickness of Ciel’s mouth. He opens his eyes sharply, attempting to blink away a darkness which refuses to abate. Then, he realizes it is still night, he is still here, sweat-sticky and burning in a bed in London. 

It feels like a grave. His head pounds and he struggles to breathe as if it’s something voluntary, and then he sees that Ciel is sprawled atop him, compressing his lungs. There’s one pallid arm thrown over his chest, resting just below Ciel’s head which is bedded down upon the ladder of bones in Sebastian’s sternum, rising and falling in time with his inhalations. In the shadows Ciel’s skin is like solid moonlight, pearly luminescence as he lays spread and vulnerable, a haunting shape beneath the sheet. Without meaning to Sebastian stops breathing all together, lets his last gasp stutter to nonexistence under this boy. He stares down at him, astonished. 

There is a fierce wave of feeling beating itself to foam inside of him; constant and incontestable. Ciel Phantomhive. This child, hardly more than eleven years old, fragile, destructible. Dust. He should not render such madness in Sebastian, but he does. In the heavy quiet of the night, breath shallow beneath Ciel’s sleep-weight, Sebastian allows himself to wonder about control, about power. What they truly are, and if they are mysteries one can truly possess and hold over another creature. He thinks about leashes, and watchdogs, and masters. He thinks about love, this human word to name a human construct, and then he thinks about the vast stretch of unnamed feeling which exists outside of it. 

Sebastian gently gathers his stiff, still-tingling arms around Ciel and shifts his weight off his own body and down to the bed beside him. Then he fills his lungs at long last, shuddering beside Ciel as he stirs in his sleep. _Love_. The word and all its messy and imperfect translations is a human invention, but the thing itself is not. It must be much older than humanity, older than hell. Older than him. It feels like a great rift in the universe, something he stumbled into accidentally because he was too arrogant to watch his step as he traversed mindlessly through the world, thinking himself invulnerable, unsinkable.

Combing his fingers gently through Ciel’s hair, Sebastian watches him twitch in the dark, nose scrunching up before his eyes open blearily, casting them both in a pale lavender glow. “Sebastian?” he murmurs. “You’re still here.” 

“I am always here, my young master,” Sebastian promises. He touches Ciel’s lips, which are still swollen and red and raw. “You ordered it, and so it is.” 

Ciel settles back down, yawning and sighing. “I know. It’s nice,” he mumbles, voice far sweeter than it ever is by daylight, slowed by sleepiness. “You’re so warm,” his eyes drift closed and he rubs his cheek into the pillow, sinking closer to Sebastian. 

Over and over again, inescapable. Sebastian’s heartbeat, the infernal clench of that horrid muscle he must suffer through as long as he is contracted. A year or so ago, he thought it was just a matter of time before he got used to what it felt like to exist in this illogical shape, this body of lies. But still, he grapples with is as if it’s a new thing, wet and crumpled wings emerging from a chrysalis. Ciel keeps changing, of course. Sebastian is inciting the change himself, he knows this. But still, the changes continue to stun him, shatter him, and he has to adjust in turn, shifting the shape of his harbor as the storm batters his shore. 

It is true that when he became Sebastian Michaelis, he intended to cultivate the perfect soul, to bend and break and mold and mine until Ciel grew to be the most beautiful thing to ever live and die in the mouth of a demon. It’s true that Sebastian set out to alter the Earl of Phantomhive completely. However, he did not expect to be altered to throughly in return. He did not expect to fall headlong into this chasm of hunger, powerless to climb back to the stars. 

He supposes he should have not been so naive. After all, this is merely a shift of energy in the universe, it is merely alchemy, thermodynamics. If he exerts such tremendous force to permute Ciel’s soul, that soul will surely twist his fiber in turn, dig fingers into the material of his own existence and sculpt it into something unforeseen. This barely tolerable flood of emotion, the deceitful body and fraud of a human heart. _Love_ , too small a word for so colossal a sensation, so colossal a starvation. The price he must pay to consume perfection. 

Ciel stirs, rustling in the sheets beside Sebastian. “I thought demons didn’t sleep,” he mumbles. Then he opens his eye with the contract seal, peering through half-moon of his lashes, a slice of blue bisected by its glowing thread of light. 

“They usually do not. Tonight was a rare exception,” Sebastian explains, thumbing beneath that half-opened eye, black nail close enough to the lid that tears spring to the cusp of it. He bends to lick them away, tongue gently sweeping across the incredible slickness of Ciel’s eye, smoother than a peeled grape. There he tastes the slightest remnant of sulfur amid the salt like a streak of poison in the otherwise pure cyan pool. 

Ciel blinds rapidly and wiggles away once Sebastian releases him, rubbing the back of his hand over his eye to soothe the sting and strangeness. “Ugh,” he says, now clearly and fully awake, “That’s revolting.” 

Sebastian smiles, bending to lick the soft pout turning down the corner of Ciel’s mouth. “So it’s acceptable for me to touch you here,” he teases, flicking his tongue into the heated slippery mess of his mouth and withdrawing before Ciel can suck him in deeper, as he always does, on instinct. “But not here?” He closes Ciel’s eye with his thumb, then fits his lips gently over the flickering lid, kissing and swirling his tongue before pulling away. “Such a fickle master,” he breathes, nodding closer again, pressing his brow to Ciel’s since he seems he cannot stay away for any amount of time, he cannot be unchanged, unmoved. 

Ciel squirms against him, still blinking and rubbing at his marked eye, lashes lowered and cheeks newly flushed. “Why would you ever want to touch my _eye_ with your _tongue_ though?” He asks, voice hushed with disbelief like he’s admitting a shameful thing. 

It comes out of Sebastian like an exhalation, like the simplest of sighs. “Because I love every part of you,” he murmurs, lips against the tender thrum of blood in Ciel’s temple, “and I love you.” It’s not quite what he means, as Ciel is a human and can only understand human love, and that is not, and can never be the way Sebastian loves him. But still, it is the nearest word, the closest cousin, and so he says it and it does not feel like a lie. It is consumptive like love, powerful and like love, it posses the same vein of wild, destructive rage. Humans may believe otherwise, but Sebastian knows that love and hate are not so different, just as salvation and damnation are not so different. Everything in this wretched world is relative. 

He watches the admission and all its terrible glory escape him, spiral out of reach like a black feather caught in a gust. It disappears into the night, and he does not chase it. There is no way to stop such a thing, for it is the truth and the grave he dug for himself when he fashioned Ciel Phantomhive into a tomb of such unrivaled beauty. 

Ciel suddenly becomes hot and still beside him as he processes it all. Sebastian cannot lie, and though Ciel must know this because he ordered it, Sebastian can sense his skepticism, his uncertainty that love is real, that love is something a child as lost he could still lay in the warmth of. And perhaps human love is a lie, but the pervasive, inescapable hunger of a demon? That is not. His voice wavers as he says “...like my father and mother loved me?” 

“Yes,” Sebastian tells him. “And how they loved each other, and how you loved that beast you named me after, and how the devout love their god,” he explains. “I love you in every way love can exist, and more.” It is the only way to explain the love of Hell, and even then, it does not come close. _I want to create and consume you,_ Sebastian thinks. _I want to murder and swallow you, for that is love_. 

Ciel rubs his face into Sebastian’s chest, overwhelmed being woken in the middle of the night only to be laid waste to like this. He shivers, grappling with the immensity of hell, which he of course cannot hold within the limits of his weak, youthful body, which will, of course, shatter him. “I thought demons...” and then he trails off, remembering that everything he thought he knew of demons has since been proven obsolete by the experience of living with one, owning one. “Does that mean you’ll never leave?” He whispers finally, voice muffled from where he’s buried his face into Sebastian’s neck. 

Over and over again, the same wish, the same order. To be saved and protected and shadowed and followed, to be cradled in a loyalty so certain there is no possibility he will suffer alone again. Sebastian presses his lips into Ciel’s hair, inhales so deeply he can smell himself in the breath, his own come and his own spit, his own indescribable pain staining Ciel from the inside out, turning him charcoal black and necrotic with the love of a demon. He wonders if when he finally consumes Ciel’s soul, if he will be able to taste his own misery in its seasoning. 

“Yes, my lord,” he assures him, over and over again. 

The sun slowly begins to rise, casting the room in a gradual pale grey like London fog which brushes itself insidiously against the shut windows from outside. Sebastian lays in the abyss he has tripped and fallen into, and either by a second miracle or some newborn habit forming in the evolution of his inevitably changing interior, they both drift to sleep again. 

\---

Under the powerful guidance of the devil, Funtom grows and expands like a plague. There are suddenly investors and buyers and brokers, drawn in like sharks to a blood spill by the immense and rapid growth. They all want to know how the business rose to such heights _following_ the family tragedy, but they do not press too hard on the matter. Everyone knows that from death springs life, that posthumous success is a strange but common phenomenon. Sebastian watches with narrowed eyes, smelling the greed and cunning radiating from them as they come sniffing and poking about the manor, testing his master’s will, his dedication to his name and all it carries. 

It is Sebastian’s observation that they find the Earl of Phantomhive to be charming and pitiable, that they envy him, thinking a child could not possibly know what to do with such wealth. They mistake his youth for weakness, for they know nothing of the power he holds in his covered eye, nor the insidious disease it has planted in him. 

As his butler and as his knight, his guardian everything else, Sebastian protects Ciel from their cruel and covetous resentment. He protects the business from competitors, from leeches. However, he does not protect Ciel from the nature of greed itself. He wants Ciel to abhor the sick gluttony of humanity just as he does, he wants him to revel in the hypocrisy of it. The outside world and in its barbs and cavities will only deepen Ciel’s contempt for his own species, and drive him further into Sebastian’s arms.

Funtom swells and spreads and blackens all it touches, spilled ink on fresh parchment. Sebastian does not save Ciel from the stain or the river, he merely builds them both a gondola with which to cross. He stands and waits for that final embrace. 

As Ciel learns of humanity’s hundred lying faces he continues to grow, in height and in understanding, becoming steadily more bitter and mistrustful the more men he meets. They all give him candy from their own subpar companies, call him _boy_ just as the queen does, ruffle his hair with heavy red palms he winces beneath, his gaze cutting to fierce loathing every time he is touched by someone who is not Sebastian. They all think he is a laughable opponent, and sputter in shock when they are proven wrong. They tumble like chess pieces, and Ciel becomes weary and jaded with mankind, just as he has been taught to. He watches with glee and wonder, and eventually with resigned satisfaction, from the sidelines as Sebastian kills for him.

“They all just want _money_ ,” he observes, slouched deep into his favorite chair following a particularly grueling meeting with a potential investor. He tugs his eyepatch off, rubbing the pink lines cut into his brow and cheek with irritation, kicking his feet beneath the desk absently before he decidedly toes off his shoes, which fall to a clatter beneath his desk. 

Sebastian nods curtly. “Mr. Chambers was quite transparent in his interests. However, you are correct in assuming similar intentions of all your visitors. Truly generous man are hard to come by.” He brandishes a dessert plate and sets it down neatly before his master. “Clove spiced Biscotti garnished with orange zest, my lord.” 

Ciel reaches for the biscotti and takes it inelegantly in his fist, stuffing it in his mouth and chewing noisily, peering through his hair at Sebastian all the while, daring him to call him anything other than a gentleman. There is often a prominent lapse in Ciel’s manners following meetings and other social obligations, as if it pains him to feign hospitality to anyone blatantly attempting to swindle him. Sebastian leans in close, close enough to observe the flush of blood which rises to Ciel’s cheeks as he brushes crumbs from the corner of his mouth with a gloved thumb. “My, my. Perhaps you are not so different,” he murmurs, breath hot in Ciel’s ear, hand moving to momentarily grip the thin slip of his throat before he pulls away. “Greed may be an inescapably human trait,” he suggests, admiring Ciel’s wide, fear-bright eyes, the spots of color below them. 

Ciel swallows, recovering quickly. “I am nothing like them. They’re mindless animals, _locusts_. Consuming everything in sight just because it is there to consume, because they think they deserve it. That is true greed.” 

“And you,” Sebastian begins, stomach roiling and seething over all the things he wants to do to this boy, all the biscotti crumbs he will find in his clothes when he shucks them to piles of darkness upon Ciel’s floor tonight. “You are _not_ greedy?” 

“I am only taking back what was taken from me,” Ciel says through a mouthful of orange and spice. “I am selfish, just as they are, yes. But not for _money_ , not out of greed. For myself. Because it’s what I want.” He swallows, using his index finger to wipe up the drizzle of icing from his plate before he slides it past his lips, cheeks flooding with another surge of heat as he watches Sebastian intently, calculating his effect on him. Sebastian holds his gaze steady, ready to crawl to wherever he is pulled to, managing his own greed, his own want. 

Ciel slides his finger from his mouth slowly, though he has yet to master coyness and there is quavering in his motion. “Come here,” he says quietly. It is not the voice of an eleven year old boy, it is not even the voice of a man. It is the voice of the damned, and Sebastian shudders with yearning to hear it. 

He strides to Ciel’s side and sinks to one knee at his feet. “What is it you want now?” he asks thickly, dropping his cheek to Ciel’s bare knee and rubbing against it, dragging his jaw up the narrow line of his thigh where the skin softens and thins. He can feel the rasping of Ciel’s breath making the whole of him tremble, the purity of want and the filth of greed blending into something glorious and indistinguishable before him. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Ciel says through his teeth, twisting his hips off of his chair and arching almost imperceptibly closer to Sebastian. “You know.” 

“Perhaps,” Sebastian admits, smoothing his hands up Ciel’s slim calves to the outside of his thighs, and further still to grip his hips. “But I, too, am selfish. And I want to hear you say it.” 

“Why?” Ciel asks, lips pursed over the shame of having to put words to something he has no words to describe. “You want to humiliate me.” 

Sebastian loves the violent color creeping down his neck, the way he squirms to the edge of the chair and back again, struggling with his fierce, nameless desires. He gazes up at Ciel, mouth parted in quiet wonder. “Not only that,” he murmurs. “It’s my job to give you exactly what you desire. To sustain your greed, your want. However you regard it. I want you to tell me what it is.” 

Ciel’s tangles a small hand in Sebastian’s hair, pulling him flush into the warmth of his lap. “Alright,” he huffs, fidgeting and restless, face hidden behind an intentional curtain of hair. “I want you to put your mouth on me,” the words stumble out of him. 

A hook twists violently in Sebastian’s insides, gutting him as he opens his lips to inhale, salt and musk and little boy, enough to make him grip rash involuntary fists deep in Ciel’s waistcoat. “Where?” he hisses. 

“I don’t _know_ ,” Ciel answers, frustrated and so blown open, voice snagging over the hangnails in his desperate, wanting body. But he does know, Sebastian can see it in his marked eye, in the flash of light therein. His fingers smooth through Sebastian’s hair, nails razing gently and mindlessly over his scalp, hips pumping in the air reflexively. “Anywhere.” He arches up off the chair, pressing himself into Sebastian’s hungry and labored breath, so pure and perfect and unfettered. “Just do it. I order it.” 

Sebastian needs skin so he seeks the closest seam, pulling Ciel’s shirt out from his waistband and up to expose a strip of pale, shuddering stomach. And there he fixes his mouth at long last, teeth and tongue and terror, Ciel spasming and spreading beneath him like a growing empire, like the greed of mankind. “Here?” He asks, licking into the hollowed cup beside Ciel’s hipbone. 

And then Ciel is sliding off the chair and to the floor between Sebastian’s knees, limp and liquid. His clothes get rucked up from the friction, hands all over Sebastian’s neck, shoulders, skull. He clings to him, shifting and bucking, brow pressed into Sebastian’s so their lips nod together, brushing in secret. “Here,” he pants into Sebastian’s mouth, pushing tentative fingers into the wet scalding heat. He slides his thumb over the tip of a fang, stricken with awe, with fear, with glory. “Here.”

Sebastian sucks half of that delicate hand into his mouth, salt and oranges and the gritty bite of dirt beneath the nails. Then he pulls it back out again and pushes Ciel’s wet fingers up into his own hair, unable to trust himself not to gnash straight through to bone. He wavers with restraint, pushing Ciel up against the desk, palms rough, jaw flickering, eyes hellfire red and world away from human. 

“No, _here_ ,” Ciel murmurs, leaning in, mouth opening wet and messy against Sebastian’s in a graceless kiss. The uncertainty of his tongue flicks out, clumsy with youth, and Sebastian kisses him back hard, kills his breath, moves him across the floor with rug-burn force as Ciel melts against him. When Sebastian pulls away air rushes into vacancy, spots of dizzying white blooming behind his eyes with the sudden onslaught of oxygen. It is sublime, unreal, and he struggles to contain the beast inside. 

“You want my mouth on your mouth?” he asks, voice hot and close and dangerous, trapping Ciel in his arms, pulling him tight and flush to his chest, so small, so easy to shatter. Ciel nods, forehead grinding into Sebastian’s, fever-hot and sweat-damp. There’s blood on his lower lip from where it has been torn to careless tatters by Sebastian’s teeth, a sweet spot of copper shining amid slick pink. Sebastian manipulates him easily, pushing him down to the fine oriental rug beneath his desk, falling between his splayed legs as if he was fashioned to fit there. “It’s called a kiss,” he tells him, bending to lick the blood away.

“I _know_ what it’s called,” Ciel pants, head lolling across the floor, hair stuck in damp chaotic clumps to his brow. “I’m not a _child_.” 

Sebastian laughs in a sharp cruel burst, digging his nails into Ciel’s tender waist, where the skin is bare and cream-white. “Is that so?” he asks, sucking at a child’s pulse, the ditch beneath a child’s clavicle, feeling a child breathe and break beneath him. 

“I just...I don’t know. Kissing is what _married_ people do,” Ciel huffs and gasps, a reed bending against Sebastian’s weight. “I wasn’t sure if...” He trails off, voice replaced with a breathy hiss. 

Sebastian thinks of marriage, what a strange and feeble thing it is to swear your loyalty to another human with God as your witness. He thinks of his branded hand and its counterpart in Ciel’s eye, binding them eternally, indestructibly. “Many contracts are bound with a kiss,” he murmurs, holding Ciel’s mouth open with his thumb and tracing his still-baby canine teeth with the tip of his tongue.

Ciel seems to accept this as fact, letting it wash over him, simple and undisputed. He runs his fingers through Sebastian’s hair, pulling him closer, deeper, so that he can suck his lips until they are swollen, eyes closed in wild, idle bliss. He is greedy and he is human, he wants what he wants and he will take it as it comes. Sebastian loves him savagely for it, for the corrupt thing he has turned into beneath the suffocating weight of his wings. 

He lets his hands wander, growing continually more aware of his own crumbling resolve as he rubs up Ciel’s fragile chest, under his crumpled shirt, beneath his shorts to the secret satin heat of his thighs. There is nothing he does not want of Ciel, nothing he does not long for, nothing he will not push towards relentlessly. Touching him has become maddening, and the more he does it the more he craves it, to where mere skin is not enough. He needs everything, he needs to crack him open, crawl inside, slide tender hands between the sacs of his organs, slick within the soup of his blood. He wants to lay his cheek against the beat of his heart and count each contraction, he wants to see the world from behind the bars of his ribcage. He wants to swallow his soul like an oyster. He wants it, sick with greed. 

At the very least, Sebastian longs desperately to feel inside Ciel. With his fingers, his tongue, the whole of his hapless body. It is not something he’s attempted yet, not because he thinks Ciel won’t allow such an invasion, but because he questions whether or not he would be able to keep from destroying him in doing so. Sebastian’s control is not absolute. 

Yet his hunger drowns out his caution, worse each time he has Ciel like his, pinned under him with those lithe legs spread, flesh so supple and willing. They kiss and they kiss, wet endless suction and Sebastian forgets he has to breathe, forgets that there is a reason he doesn’t trust himself to touch Ciel where he is touching him, hands up as far as they can go into the leg of his shorts. 

He kneads and pries, struggles free from one of his gloves so that he can inch bare fingers into Ciel’s hot, damp crease, feeling him squirm and shudder with strangeness. There’s a choking sound stifled somewhere deep inside Ciel’s throat, a high keening groan Sebastian swallows before it can be sullied by the surrounding air. Sebastian nudges his fingertip against the tight ring of muscle, the twitching burn of it, so soft and puckered. Ciel convulses at the touch, tongue lashing mindlessly in Sebastian’s mouth as he tenses. Sebastian’s control wavers like a flame, and then, snuffs out. 

He cannot help grinding his own hips against the carpet in senseless abandon, stripped of his self-possession as Ciel opens up for him slightly, giving way to first joint of his finger, infernal and searing. He is unbearably tight, too tight to stay inside and Sebastian is forced from the terrible heat as Ciel pulses and throbs. Sebastian releases his swollen lips, brings his own quaking bare fingers into his mouth so he can suck Ciel’s taste from them, dark and earthy and bitter and perfect. He produces a mouthful of spit, lets it collect and drop onto his palm thick as honey. 

“What are you doing?” Ciel asks through a haze, violent spots of color shining through the mess of his hair, eye fiercely illuminated, voice hoarse and ragged. He lets go of Sebastian long enough to unbutton his own shorts and wiggle out of them, parting his thighs with his eyes half-lidded and tongue sweeping over his lips. He is a picture of want, a masterpiece of purity, selfishness, greed. Sebastian says nothing in response as words feel tenuous and his throat is thick and silenced with yearning. 

Plus, Ciel is so hard, flushed red and twitching in Sebastian’s reckless exhalations. Moved, Sebastian bends his head and drools down the insubstantial length, swallowing him deeply so that his lips are nestled against his sticky skin with its translucent sheen of fine hair, sweet and downy with youth. He’s so small, something Sebastian can fit in his palm, beneath his tongue, small enough to wedge into the carotid artery and stop a heart from beating. Sebastian’s heart stops now, stuttering and lurching as he coats his fingers in his handful of saliva, spreading it into Ciel. 

Wet, he’s easy so slide up inside, like he is built to be filled up. Molten velvet, searing and smooth, sucking Sebastian’s fingers up into him even as he instinctually arches and twists away from the intrusion. Sebastian struggles desperately to maintain composure, crooking his fingers against the terrible slickness of him, imagining the way it would feel to sink into such darkness and come, to rut up against his body, inside his body. 

“Sebastian,” Ciel keeps saying, head thrown back as his hips jerk and buck. “Sebastian,” like it is the only word he remembers, the only word with meaning, the whole of his wretched existence. One of his hands grips in Sebastian’s hair, the other up by his own mouth, his thumb between his teeth as he sucks like a infant, “Sebastian,” torn and slurred around it. 

Stomach turning and coiling like a snake around prey, Sebastian works his fingers in and out of the tight, impossible heat, maddened by the wetness, the obscenity. Ciel tastes sharp and salty with sweat and boyishness and he’s lost in it, ready to split him open and drink every drop of blood which will surge forth from such fault. 

Ciel begins to relax and open up, growing softer as he stretches to accommodate another spit-slick finger. He whines high and involuntary, pulse pounding inside Sebastian’s mouth as if it were his heart he were sucking upon. Sebastian pushes inside and pulls him apart, thumb rubbing experimentally against his tight rim, where he’s pulled taut and pink and slippery. Holding him apart Sebastian pushes his fingers up into him, making Ciel’s tiny body rock rhythmically against the carpet, rubbing his pale back raw with friction. It’s so easy, Ciel takes him and takes him, stocking feet crossed loosely behind Sebastian’s neck as he arches off the floor for him, sucking his thumb, wailing and whining like the wind. 

Even in hell, there is nothing this damnable, nothing this hot. Sebastian’s fingers burn in the gripping heat as he feels Ciel from the inside out, sliding in and out of the vice-tight velveteen and he grinds himself into the floor like an animal. Finally overcome, Ciel lifts his hips from the rug and locks his spine, pulsing into Sebastian’s throat. It’s just a single mouthful of gossamer stickiness, thin and prepubescent, all he can create with his eleven year old body in all its weakness and delicacy. Sebastian groans around him as he feels Ciel’s insides seize, fierce, pure contractions drawing him deeper, holding him fast. 

Sebastian comes in his trousers at the feel of it, wings vast and rearing, horrible feathered tidal waves trapped beneath Ciel’s desk, inside Ciel’s study, crushed to dust by the walks of the Phantomhive Manor.The world is not big enough for all of hell’s want, Ciel’s body cannot possibly contain the rage of hell’s greed. 

Sebastian sobs into Ciel’s lap, cheek slicked in spit and boy-come as he empties himself, graceless and wild and inhuman. Feathers fall around them like cinders from a home which burnt some years before, and when it stutters to an ending Sebastian’s fingers slide wetly from Ciel’s spent flesh, coated in a thin patina of spit-diluted blood.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short short short chapter. To indicate an oncoming storm.

It becomes a ritual, sacred and committed by moonlight, and as always the Earl of Phantomhive astonishes Sebastian with the depth of his soul. A child should not be able to take as much as this one does, but he _does_. Does and does again, his legs hooked up behind Sebastian’s neck, iridescent and dewy with sweat as Sebastian twists him into impossible shapes. Clouds, conch shells, lightening. Fingers deep inside him where he is so soft and bitter and saccharine all at once. Ciel takes it and revels in it, back vaulted like the ceiling of a chapel as he comes dry and lurching and over and over again in the way only a child can. 

Sebastian holds on to his own composure with fraying desperation through the rite. It is only his hands, two fingers and sometimes three if he uses his tongue to loosen him for long enough before pushing inside, but it is only a matter of time before he can wait no longer. 

It feels like rebuilding the manor from its blackened husk of char and ash, creating something to live in from mere ruins. Each time Ciel falls to the mattress coiled and panting and bright-eyed, Sebastian rises to his knees, stunned to find him still alive, still supple and pliant with pleasure. If Ciel is too wrecked and beside himself to suck Sebastian to finish, he will bear down upon him, rub himself to ribbons upon the pale, quivering warmth of Ciel’s stomach, into the delicate hollow of his back. 

_Too much_ , he thinks as he touches and touches, the tendons in his forearms tight as he clutches Ciel’s arms with bruising force and rides the smooth swell of his thigh to static and deafness. _Too much. You will spoil your supper. You will spoil everything._

But still, Sebastian spoils and spoils him, fist in Ciel’s hair, lips on his throat. As he comes down with the rain of falling stars behind his eyelids, he wonders if there is such a thing as too much corruption carved into a subject’s soul, too many threads of darkness to sew. He wonders if he can oversaturate Ciel with his own flavor, his own want. If biting into him on that final day will taste like a shot of his own blood. _Too much_ , he thinks again. 

However, the wondering dies as he looks upon him, the boy with his skin of pearl thrown back into a tangle of sheets like a throne of ice, his eyes diamond hard and impossibly blue in the moonlight. An artful splatter of shining white upon him, from where Sebastian let go of everything. 

He stares back at Sebastian with certainty, an unfaltering acceptance of what is to come etched into his soft face, aging him. The contract seal glows, solid and bright as the north star. He does not belong to the devil because Sebastian took him, be belongs to the devil because he _sold himself_. He belongs to the devil because of who he is, and who he is meant to be. The Earl of Phantomhive is an agent in his own damnation, just as throughly as Sebastian is. If it were any other way, Sebastian would not love him so. 

Sebastian smooths a still tremulous hand up Ciel’s stomach, head cocked as he catches his breath. “My lord,” he says like a prayer. “My terrible, cruel little lord.” 

Ciel reaches for his hand, and brings Sebastian’s index and middle fingers, pale white and puckered with dampness from being inside him for so very long, and slides them into his own mouth. _You’ll spoil your supper_ , Sebastian thinks, eyelids sliding shut over a magnificent surge of fire as he chokes the Earl of Phantomhive. _You’ll spoil everything._


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If you can't tell already, I'm really obbsessed with Ciel puking. I wish is happened more, and it happens a lot. Puke all the time, little baby. Sebastian will clean it up for you. More of this, hope you enjoy! Thanks again for all the wonderful reviews you have been leaving.

The queen requests that her watchdog dispel a brothel rumored to be offering the services of young girls, some of which are not much older than the watchdog himself. Ciel is twelve, and on the carriage ride to the train station, he asks his butler what a brothel is. 

“It is a storefront of sorts,” Sebastian explains, a smirk drawing up the corner of his mouth like the edge of a sickle moon. “But rather than material goods, one can purchase the company of women.” 

Ciel glares at him from beneath the brim of his top hat with its royal blue ribbon, his one uncovered eye partially obscured by hair and shadow. “Their _company_?” He asks in a scathing tone, making it clear he knows Sebastian is using a euphemism for something. Ciel thinks that euphemism, (unless it is poetry and therefore holds artistic merit and wit and even then he is a strict judge of what truly constitutes as poetry), is no better than lying. Sebastian smiles a full smile now, the tips of his fangs emerging from beneath the curl of his lip. 

“Pardon me, young master. I meant that brothel is storefront where one can purchase the _flesh_ of women.” He lets the words hang in the air, delighted at the way Ciel’s face stays pale and placid for a moment as he contemplates the potential meaning, before he suddenly flushes, realizing what Sebastian has implied. 

Only recently has Ciel begun to show understanding in regards to sex. The more they venture into the east end, the more he realizes that there are no limits to mankind's depravity, that there are worse fates to befall a body than pure pain, pure torture. Sebastian watches him assemble the pieces he collects in London, watches him slowly give depth and weight to the things they do together behind the walls of the Phantomhive Manor. 

He waits for Ciel to ask him if their sacrament, in all its labyrinthine passages and void-filling immensity, is sex. He wonders how he will answer when he does. Sebastian _knows_ sex, knows its baseness, knows its emptiness. He has experienced it with countless humans, and none of those former experiences seem even remotely similar to his possession of Ciel Phantomhive. However, he cannot lie. If Ciel asks, he must answer. 

The carriage rattles on, trembling along the pockmarked road. Ciel sits back and clasps his gloved hands upon his walking stick with determination, visibly mulling over the existence of place where something as immaterial as sex can be bought and sold like meat at the butcher shop. “Humanity is vile,” he finally observes, as if he is not a human, as if he is not vile himself. As if sex is something which exists outside of his world. 

“Quite,” Sebastian agrees. “But also very interesting.” 

Ciel laughs but it sound like a bark, quick and curt and humorless. “There is nothing _interesting_ about buying _sex_ ,” he says, spitting that final word out in all its filth and glory. It sounds like a finger being pulled from wet suction, it feels like the crack of a palm over white flesh. 

_Oh_ Sebastian thinks, wanting to reach out and grab Ciel by the throat to see the skin there pinken, wanting to bite something until it gives. He swells and sways inside, he allows Ciel to see the flash of garnet which ignites in his eyes. _Tell me_ he dares with his gaze. _Tell me you know nothing of flesh._

There is a moment, however fleeting, when Ciel looks frightened. Then it is gone, replaced with his usual impertinence, all the brilliance and arrogance that comes along with being twelve years old and invincible upon the back of his fierce black steed. “I just think it’s pathetic,” he adds, and tears his gaze from Sebastian and to the window, where the landscape rolls by. “To buy a thing so insignificant and worthless in an alleyway. It’s no better than feeding an opium addiction.” 

Sebastian watches, and waits. Ciel seems to know sex is something adult, something forbidden, seeing as it is a frequent component in the cases her Majesty sends him to London to investigate. He seems to know it is of the body, that it is something which occurs in shame and in darkness and in dirt, alongside drugs and murder. He’s spoken to and interrogated prostitutes in search of information, and he has seen their plunging necklines and skintight skirts, their painted mouths and eyes swimming with sorrow. He’s seen it all and connected it to the word _sex_ , that single syllable, steeped in vulgarity. 

However, Sebastian can sense that Ciel finds the actual _act_ of sex to be still cloaked in mystery, reticent and sinister behind its skin of grime. He must wonder what it truly is, and if it can possibly be the same thing that Sebastian does to him, a thing which feels so terribly good, which transcends words. 

The underworld has not taught Ciel that sex is an act of love, only that it hurts and it kills and is cheap and polluted. But hell, hell has taught him otherwise. Hell is the absence of pain, hell is survival, hell is everything. Ciel must find it terribly confusing, this thing called sex. He must wonder what happens to him in Sebastian’s hands, how he can long for the same thing he abhors. 

Intrigued by this duality, Sebastian shifts fluidly from his side of the carriage to sit beside his master, pushing the length of his thigh against Ciel’s own pale, narrow leg, leaning his lips into the delicate shell of his ear. Ciel freezes, growing instantly hot against Sebastian. 

Lips parted, he brushes them against Ciel’s temple, where he can see a frantic blue flicker of a veins beneath the surface. “What is it you find pathetic?” he breathes, sliding a firm hand up to the crook of Ciel’s elbow to feel the quickened thrum of his pulse. He wants him to react, wants to test his innocence, his prudence. 

Ciel wrenches away, smacking Sebastian’s hand off of his skin before reeling into the carriage wall with a dull thump. “What are you _doing_?” He hisses, deeply ashamed, cheeks so violently red Sebastian can smell the blood it is so very close to the surface. “Control yourself,” he says with a shaking voice, eyes flashing with pupil. “You absolutely cannot touch me like that here.” 

“My apologies,” Sebastian says in a smooth voice, alighting upon his own side of the carriage, head bowed humbly. “I was testing a theory.” 

“And what theory was _that_?” Ciel sneers, still visibly trembling, his young body so heated and confused and yearning.

_It must be terribly confusing_ Sebastian thinks, heart aching inside his chest in fascination. Only recently has Ciel demonstrated such blatant humiliation in regards to Sebastian’s touch. Before his building knowledge of sex and all its profane manifestations in the criminal underworld, he did not seem fully aware of the intentions behind it. It was just something he did, the duty of a butler, catering to his master’s whims and desires. Feeding Ciel, bathing him, putting him to bed, spreading him out and kissing his skin to sleep, pushing inside him until he was full and stinging. Part parent, part guardian, part savior. 

Now, Ciel is acting as if it is different. Not just another way in which they interact as master and servant, as holy father and bastard child, but something singular, something private. Something shameful, connected to the grand mystifying terror of _sex_. The change is thrilling, but it is also dangerous. Sebastian is not sure where this knowledge will take them. 

“My theory that you are growing up very quickly,” he settles upon. 

Ciel eyes him suspiciously. “I see.” 

The horses pull them ever closer to London, and a thick quiet falls between their bodies. Ciel broods, and Sebastian watches, waiting, knowing today is just another day which will further elucidate the Earl of Phantomhive’s understanding of their currently unspoken enigma.

In the underworld, sex is touch, sex is sweat and spit and violation. In the Phantomhive manor, Sebastian touches him, makes him sweat, spits into him, violates him. He knows this, he _must_ know, because Sebastian can see the comprehension etched upon him, stitched into expression in all its grief and bewilderment. Sebastian wonders what he will gain as Ciel grows, but also, what he will lose. 

\---

She cannot be older than thirteen, though she could easily be eight or nine. It’s hard to tell since she is so very malnourished, there’s no extra padding about her chest or hips, just the sharp jut of bones, hills and valleys beneath the tight brown drum of her skin. She’s indian, eyes lines in heavy black kohl and a bit of glass stuck to her forehead in efforts to weakly accentuate and sell her exoticism. There’s a yawning chasm of black upon her throat, something dark and fathomless, clotted and putrid. She’s dead. 

Ciel stands over her, lifting her thin, limp wrist with the end of his walking stick, then letting it fall back to the bloodstained mattress with a dull thud. He uses his monogramed kerchief to wipe the ebony clean, wrinkling his nose. “I suppose we were too late,” he says coldly, although his voice is weak. 

Her dress is rucked up around her hips, revealing her smooth, dark pubic mound and the black smear of gore streaked down her inner thigh. Ciel keeps standing and staring, tangibly repulsed by the raw vulnerability of it all, by the horror and malice of _sex_. Something is dawning upon him, something vast and unknown. Sebastian watches him waver, swaying where he stands like he is braced against a gale, color draining from his face. 

He catches the Earl of Phantomhive before he falls to the littered floor of the brothel bedroom, scooping him neatly to stand upon his feet again, hands braced on his narrow, heaving shoulders. Ciel wretches, mouth wracked around a wet animal sound, then vomits spectacularly onto the crime scene. It bubbles forth from his lips, muddy brown speckled with blackberry seeds from the compote Sebastian made him this morning. His head bends, a string of thick drool still dangling from his lips as he struggles to breathe, and Sebastian uses his gloved fingers to neatly slick it away, holding Ciel upright with his other arm. “Since when is the young master so squeamish?” He murmurs, wiping his fingers off in Ciel’s kerchief to keep himself from licking them clean.

Through ragged breath, Ciel says, “The fumes.” 

It’s true, the stench of death is overwhelming. They found the brothel this way, locked from the inside and littered with bodies beyond the swollen oak door Sebastian broke down so they could enter. All of the prostitutes had been slain, throat slit and legs spread lewdly, as someone had gotten his final fix before doing himself in with a revolver in the dank hallway. Too late indeed. Either he heard the Queens Watchdog was on his way, or some other adversary beat them here and made it appear like a suicide. Her Majesty’s orders were to dispose of the ringleader return any remaining underaged girls for the yard to deal with. At least a fraction of this order is fulfilled, even if it wasn’t completed by the hand of Phantomhive. 

Sebastian smooths Ciel’s hair until he regains his balance and stands capably on his own two feet. “There’s nothing for us here,” he manages to say, wiping his mouth on the back of his glove, eyes carefully averted away from the narrow brown corpse splayed on the bed, no bigger than him, no smaller and no older. Sebastian nods, hand lain gently into the small of Ciel’s back, prepared to take his weight if necessary. 

They stagger from the rot-thick darkness, over stained mattresses and heaped clothes and a fermenting piss pots, Ciel’s nose and mouth buried in his kerchief as he breathes shallowly. “How are you feeling, young master?” Sebastian asks, noticing the way Ciel twists out from under his touch once they emerge into a starlit London.

“Fine,” he says sharply, shaking his head like he’s trying to dispel the image seared into his mind, a child with her blank, glassy eyes and splayed legs, a human wishbone ready for splitting. Sebastian aches for him, wants to crawl inside his head so he can see what he is seeing, feel what he is feeling, preserve his horror endlessly. “Dizzy,” Ciel adds, struggling to walk in a straight line ahead of Sebastian. “But fine.” 

Beneath the scent of decay, Sebastian smells a lie, a worm coiled into the sweet flesh of an apple. He swallows his hunger, and follows his master into the night.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you all can probably tell from reading this so far, I'm really interested in Sebastian's limits, his self-control, his composure, and where all of those things might end. I'm also really interested in his inhumanity. More on all of that in here. Thanks again to all my wonderful readers!

Ciel is even more stoic than usual the following morning, and the journey back to the countryside passes in hardly interrupted silence. He is lost in thought, face pressed to his gloved fist, eyes anywhere but Sebastian, who is blessed with much time to study him as a result. 

Sebastian thinks he looks older than he did before the brothel, though still so tragically young. There are smudges of darkness below his eyes belying a restless night, and a gravity creasing his brow like it hurts to think. The shadows upon his face seem to be in the shape of Sebastian’s lips, and though Sebastian thinks of proving this to them both, he does not. He can sense an immense shift, something seismic shuddering between them. He waits for the wave to break. 

The carriage finally rolls to a lurching stop at Phantomhive manor, and Ciel does not even wait for Sebastian to step out first and open the door for him as he always does. Instead he pushes his own way out and hops down to the cobblestone drive, swaying beneath the awkward weight of his own hat, bracing himself upright with his walking stick, the tiniest of old men. Sebastian follows, eyebrows raised. 

“Are you coming?” Ciel barks over his shoulder, glancing briefly at Sebastian with one solitary bruised eye, the blue of it nearly storm-grey with darkness. 

“Of course,” Sebastian answers, and steps in line behind his master. 

It’s over dinner that Ciel finally presents the culmination of his hours spent brooding. He is pushing his poached salmon around his plate, forcing it to swim again amid its citrus and black pepper sauce. It is very unlike Ciel to play with his food in favor of eating it, especially following a day of travel, so Sebastian suspects the tremors to reach their final crescendo, an earthquake to draw its fingers through the earth and shatter their foundation. He is still struck silent when it happens. 

“I’m twelve now,” Ciel begins, spearing a lemon rind with his fork. “I am no longer a child, do you agree?” 

Sebastian does not agree, at least not entirely. Ciel knows pain far greater than most children his age, he knows far more of the wretchedness on earth, has witnessed things most children do not even have words for. But still, he is so small, so breakable, so foolish. Though he possesses the contempt of something withered and ancient, that contempt is made all the more beautiful because of his youth. Sebastian cannot lie, he can only choose his words with prudence. “You do possess knowledge and experience beyond your years,” is the truth he settles upon. 

Ciel takes it. “Since I have grown, there are certain things I no longer requite a butler for,” he explains, eyes still fixed upon the demolished mess on his plate, avoiding Sebastian’s gaze as he constructs his new set of rules for the next round of their never-ending game. With a thumb and forefinger, he plucks a spring of parsley from the edge of his plate and garnishes his mutilated fillet of salmon with it, a final touch to the mess he has made of Sebastian’s meal. 

Sebastian’s stomach rolls in combined amusement and apprehension. He can sense the direction this is heading in, the distance Ciel is attempting to carve between their bodies in order to prove to himself that he is not just another slaughtered child in a brothel, glass painted onto his brow and his throat caked in carnage. It is a pathetic attempt, too little and too late, for his skin has already been blackened one thousand times over by the devil’s hands, they are already twined inextricably. Sebastian wonders how long he will be able to abstain from this before he realizes the depth of the hooks hell has in him. “Oh?” he asks, feigning ignorance. “And what might those be?” 

Finally, Ciel looks him in the eye. He seems so very tired, exhausted by the effort of standing on his own, of thinking for the duration of the carriage ride instead of falling asleep on his butler’s lapel as he usually does on the trip back from London. Sebastian wants to reach out and smooth the shadows away from his eyes like they are only the remnants of an Ash Wednesday mass, remembering the perpetual darkness which used to reside there two years ago, before Ciel learned to sleep in his this shipwreck of a home. He holds back, prepared to honor whatever Ciel wants to deny them both.

Ciel clears his throat, setting down his fork and folding his hands neatly. “Bathing, for one. I can bathe myself starting tonight. And then dressing and undressing,” he lists, eye fixed upon Sebastian, fatigued and half-lidded. “You will still cook for me and clean my clothes and the manor, and attend to the Funtom finances and business affairs,” he explains. “But I will no longer need assistance in more personal matters. It should give you more time to devote to your other duties. That’s all.” 

Sebastian is somewhat stunned by his clarity, curious as to how long this can possibly last. Ciel has not bathed himself nor dressed himself since his one feeble attempt at autonomy shortly after Sebastian ripped a tooth from its moorings months into their contract. Unless he has been practicing in secret, Sebastian is fairly certain Ciel isn’t remotely capable of completing these endeavors on his own. Regardless, he nods, bowing shallowly before his master. It is his job. “Very well.” 

Ciel sighs, looking relieved. He takes the first bite of his dinner and as he chews, he flits his gaze up to Sebastian. “You’re dismissed,” he tells him, mouth full. 

“Yes, my lord,” is his automatic reply. _Interesting_ he thinks as he often does, glancing down to the pristine white of his gloves, the forever-longing to touch and pry and fold and shatter the Earl of Phantomhive to dust and tatters. He wonders how long it will be before he is inevitably granted admission into what is his once again, and if he will have to fight for that admission, or sit back and allow it to wash over him like the water held behind a crumbling dam. 

\---

It has been a week or restraint and agony, and Sebastian is starting to grow impossibly hungry. It’s a terrible ache in his interior, gnawing at him from the inside as he shares space with Ciel, this soul he has poured so much artistry and intent into shaping so that it fits perfectly inside his own mouth, his own stomach, his heart. 

He has taken to spending the new stretch of time Ciel provided him with in his room, one palm braced at the edge of his bed, clutching into the sheets while he fists himself so hot, searing emptiness with the other, Ciel’s name on his lips. It’s a pitiful thing and he feels base for being reduced to it, but it is better than following his master about with a sail of blackness billowing behind him, incapable of containing his want within the lie of ribs and skin. It is pitiful, but it is not shameful.

Sebastian maintains his butler aesthetic flawlessly in Ciel’s presence, but transforms into a beast behind closed doors, glowing red embers in a room full of furious, filthy black. He rages and he wrecks, smashing himself to brittle cinders as he writhes and tears through the four poster, beneath it, across the armoire and through the closet like a raven trapped in an attic. Then once he has destroyed enough, he settles in a heap of rippling shadow upon his floor, heaving and undulating until his human form shudders to existence once again, nude and shaking in a slick of sweat. 

When Ciel dispossessed him of his carnal responsibilities, he did not expect to become so undone. He anticipated impatience, irritation at most, just a faint nagging in his gut while he waited for this child to grow tired of his petty game and admit he can do nothing without Sebastian guiding him, that he cannot take the recoil without Sebastian to absorb the shock. 

However, his young master always manages to astonish him, and here they both are. Ciel certainly struggles with his new independence; he cannot leave the house for his clothes are too crooked and crudely buttoned, and his hair is oily and perpetually rucked up in back from sleeping, but he does not seem to be coming apart at the seams as Sebastian is. He does not seem to be losing his mind; he has not crawled back between Sebastian’s legs on bloody knees, parched for him. 

Meanwhile, Sebastian is falling to pieces. He has never known himself to lose control. Perhaps grapple which it, tremble and fight against it, but not _lose_ it like he is losing it now. He’s realizing in its absence that Ciel’s flesh is his only sustenance, the only thing which can abate his profound and unholy hunger. Without it, he is nothing. Just an animal, fashioned from bloodlust and feathers and talons, deplorable in his simplicity. He feels denied, stripped of his art and his meaning. 

Sebastian comes into a raw palm, sheets in his teeth to strangle the anguish, the single syllable of his master’s forbidden first name. He rubs his cheek against the mark sunk deep and aching into the back of his hand as he comes down, hair and cotton stuck to his tongue. There he lies, panting and yearning and profane, a picture of sin. 

Gathering himself to dress, his hands shake in disgrace as he buttons his uniform, preparing to walk the halls of the Phantomhive manor yet again. It’s easier when he’s empty, when his body is not taut with desire. But still, it stings. Pulls at his insides. He inhales raggedly, drags himself from the close, tarry humidity of his bedroom to bring Ciel the evening tea. 

He finds his master seated behind his desk in the study, playing chess with himself. Sebastian can smell him from several feet away, sharp pubescent sweat and dirty hair, so overwhelmingly delectable it feels like the twist of a knife to be denied proximity. Sebastian’s mouth waters as he pours Ciel tea, the amber slosh of it into the delicate porcelain executed with as much grace and elegance as ever. There is nothing in Sebastian’s performance to bely the shreds of his interior. He is thankful at least for that much. 

“Ceylon this evening, my lord,” he says, topping off the cup and offering it to Ciel. “I had it ordered especially for you from Sri Lanka.” 

“Hm,” Ciel responds without looking up, fingers tapping thoughtfully atop the black rook he is holding. 

Sebastian surveys his half-finished game, examining the potential gambits and their outcomes. Then he reaches down, grasping the queen and moving her across the board in a quick, subtle flourish. “Check,” he quips. 

Ciel glares up at him with fire in his eyes, reaching across the board to smack Sebastian’s hand away from the pieces with a fierce, proud vehemence. The fury tightening his body is exquisite, the smell of it thick and biting as he snaps, “I was not playing with _you_.” 

“So you were not,” Sebastian agrees, setting the platter and steeped pot of Ceylon carefully atop his cart once again. “I see you are playing alone. Therefore, I was only offering aid to a fraction of yourself, since you have no true opponent,” he explains, smiling a flat smile with his eyes shut in false humility. 

Ciel sighs, a brash explosive burst of air like it hurts him to be in the same _room_ as Sebastian, like he cannot stand the company of something which mocks him so. “I did not request your aid, either,” he snarls. 

“Quite correct,” Sebastian says, and moves the queen back into its original space. “My apologies.” He steps back. From several feet away he examines his master, ruddy-cheeked and unclean in his wrinkled clothes and too-loose cravat. He desperately wants to end this charade, step into Ciel’s space and crowd his childish conceit out of it, take what’s his once again. He looks so ridiculous there in a chair too large for him, playing a that lonesome game for two, unwashed and unscrubbed and infant. 

“Hm,” Ciel mumbles again, short and dismissive. His fingers dust beautifully across the top of his desk, scattering crumbs there from that morning’s Madelines before they creep up into his tea, testing its warmth. He has been full of these obscenities all week, chewing with his mouth open, licking traces of dinner from his fork. Sometimes his eyes will dart furtively to Sebastian to test for his reaction. Other times they won’t. 

Sebastian looks away this time, not wanting to think about the Earl of Phantomhive’s fingertips damp and hot with Ceylon. He is sick enough already. However, his eyes are covetous and his control is an ever crumbling thing, so his gaze inevitably sweeps back to the center of the room, moving to rove over this little boy, his uncombed hair dark and chaotic, so sweet in his perfume of loneliness. 

He smiles, brief and irreverent, fleetingly pleased by Ciel’s shortcomings. He does not know how to bathe himself and has been doing so infrequently and poorly over the course of this week; Sebastian suspects he does not know how to properly heat the water, but would rather his pride remain intact than ask his butler for assistance. 

When he first brought Ciel back from the brink of death two years and some months ago, his tiny body was so incredibly caked in a crust of filth and blood that he was nearly unrecognizable as a human child at all. Sebastian remembers that first bath, Ciel so limp and dull-eyed in the steam as he was baptized, Sebastian’s broad pale hands gently wiping and rubbing across so much stinging skin, a map of bruises and scrapes and memories. He remembers the water turning pink-brown, he remembers Ciel’s chorus of cries, the number of times he winced and wept. Sebastian remembers handling his diminutive charge with as much delicacy and care as he could possibly manage with such new and unfamiliar hands, wondering how he was possibly going to tend to a child when he was nothing but a beast, a wide snapping maw and a hunger to end the world. 

And now, he thinks of doing the same. Scrubbing Ciel’s past from his flesh until it is flushed and shining, making him clean and bright and fresh, so that he can sully him with cinders once again. _Only I can make you reek of sweat and rapture_ , he thinks, wheeling his cart from the room without looking over his shoulder though he desperately wants to. _Only in my filth can you languish._

Once he shuts the door to the study behind him, he hears Ciel let out a deep, shuddering sigh in his supposed solitude, and he presses an ear to crack to listen to whatever follows. Ciel’s breath staggers for a moment, a stifled staccato of frustration, and then he audibly uprights his chessboard, knocking it across the room along with a short, wordless shout. Sebastian listens to the clatter of ivory game pieces hitting the desk and tumbling to the carpet beneath, and forces his own fist between his teeth, flesh again enslaved to the terrible sway of unshakable hunger.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm usually not very into Ciel crying in fan fiction, because it seems OOC to me. But then I wrote this. I blame it on the fact this Ciel is not yet canon Ciel and is still capable of being broken, still has a ways to go, further to harden. Thank you again, readers and reviewers! <3

It’s three hours after midnight and Sebastian is wrist deep in raw dough, kneading and shaping it into artful knots to bake for tomorrow. His suit jacket is hanging up to prevent it from becoming dusted in flour, the sleeves of his shirt pushed neatly to the pale ditch of his elbow as he rolls out dough into a pantomime of a full moon. 

Light footfalls outside the kitchen, hesitating just beyond the door. Normally strange steps in the night would be a cause for alarm, but Sebastian recognizes their weight, their softness, their tenor. Years of belonging to the Earl of Phantomhive have taught Sebastian all the different ways he sounds, the patter of his bare feet, the strangled catch of his breath when he grips small fists in waistcoat wool, grinding his teeth as he comes. 

Sebastian stands upright, rubbing his palms together to dispel the flour that is caked in all their creases, and waits for his master to emerge. Finally, Ciel tiptoes like a specter from the shadows, looking tragically diminutive in his bed clothes, pale and bony. He stares at Sebastian with haunted eyes, still and stricken like he imagined arriving here, but nothing beyond that. The five-pointed star in his eye glimmers in the night, calling out to Sebastian in wordless longing. 

“Young master,” Sebastian says gently, sweeping his gaze up slender legs, detecting the tremor in them. “It’s well after your bedtime. And you must be quite chilled.” 

“I can’t sleep,” Ciel declares, still staring hard at Sebastian, peering up through shiny, mussed clumps of his hair. He is in such disarray, so lost, attempting to muster his usual expression of scorn and failing. Sebastian knows he was looking for the simple answer to his confusion, that he considered pushing the devil from his bed and from his heart might bring him some clearer meaning, a path from the convoluted snare of vine and thorns which binds them together. But the thorns only sunk into skin, the vines only tightened their grip, and now Ciel is bleeding and cannot breathe, and he is still not any further from his fate. Here he stands, wavering on the threshold. 

They regard each other in silence for a moment. “I see,” Sebastian murmurs, face partially obscured by two wings of black hair. Would you like me to fix you a cup of--”

“No,” Ciel cuts him off, taking an uncertain half-step towards Sebastian, hands meeting in front of his own frail body to clasp and twist together like courting doves. His voice is shaking. “I want you to come here.” 

It’s not what Sebastian is expecting and his stomach plummets at the cold simplicity of it, Ciel’s defeated resignation, his conviction, his fear, his surrender. Then the hunger ignites in him, vast and searing; he cannot think, he cannot breathe. 

In an assail of inhuman grace Sebastian is upon Ciel like a raptor descending to its prey. He crushes his delicate shoulders, pushes his bare hands up through the greasy tangles of his hair and there is flour everywhere, handprints of flour stamped onto the underside of Ciel’s thighs as Sebastian lifts him him easily and slams him into the kitchen wall with no gentleness. 

Ciel grips him back, teeth showing in a wild half-grimace, the eternal smile of a skull. His small hands are in Sebastian’s hair, clawing over his back, his flour-powdery forearms, up between the layers of his waistcoat and dress shirt to seek heat as Sebastian pitches headlong into him, whatever he can reach. He fixes his mouth onto the thrum of his pulse and swirls his tongue, tasting dirt and salt and adolescent boy, and beneath that something sick and rotten and wonderful. Something like hopelessness, like acquiescence. He dines and he dines. 

Ciel’s a mess of tears, of dread and desire. Sebastian moans into godless skin, dragging his face up the willowy tendons in Ciel’s neck, biting and sucking with no restraint, nothing but the intent to bruise. All the while Ciel hangs from him, a frenzied bucking weight in his arms. As the roar of blood assumes a pattern in Sebastian’s ears, he realizes that Ciel is saying something between his staggering breaths, stretched and snagging. “I’m sorry,” he sobs, broken down over Sebastian’s shoulder, face hot-wet and crumpled. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” 

Shake, Sebastian puts his hands all over Ciel’s tiny heaving body, pushing up under the hem of his bedclothes so that he can smooth up sticky skin, bits of silt and dead skin pilling up under his nails as he rakes them down his back. “Young master,” he breathes into Ciel’s ear, powerless, unable to keep from licking up into the delicate shell of it. “My young master, in this moment you owe me nothing.” 

“I’m _sick_ ,” Ciel wails, a string of clear viscous snot adhering him to the spreading wet spot upon Sebastian’s collar. Sebastian tilts Ciel’s head back with a palm on his brow and licks it away, swallowing salty mouthfuls of Ciel’s sorrow, using the wall to brace their combined weight. 

“I’m sick and I’m _broken_ , I don’t even know how to _feel_ without you, I don’t even know what I _am,_ ” Ciel continues, becoming limp with overwhelm, forehead pressed into Sebastian’s as he hiccups and chokes.

“I know what you are,” Sebastian tells him, sliding his thumb over his lower lip, the tiny plump curve of is slick with tears and spit. 

“What am I?” Ciel begs, so young and so, so little in Sebastian’s arms, just a ribcage to crush, nothing to protect his shuddering heart. 

Sebastian drags their mouths together, licks deeply into the sweet-salty slipperiness behind Ciel’s teeth, so starved for this, so sold, so possessed. He makes fists in his hair and in his skin, knowing nothing besides what this boy is, swallowing his every whimper, his every tear. “You are my mine,” he says into the hot close space between their lips, holding his chin between one thumb and forefinger. 

Ciel only cries harder, great, body-harrowing sobs which make him shake in Sebastian’s arms, snap and wrack between Sebastian’s body and the wall in mourning. He mourns his childhood, his innocence, having his whole world ripped from him and replaced with a solitary black butler, two hands and one cruel heart. He grieves that his solace is hell, that hell is what he is now, where he belongs. He collapses into Sebastian, entirely conquered. 

Sebastian smooths Ciel’s hair, holds him close, abandons his not-yet bread and his hanging suit jacket to carry the Earl of Phantomhive to bed. 

\---

There in the moonlit quiet of Ciel’s room Sebastian dips him to the mattress, palms still riding the little tremors and aftershocks which shake his body. “My lord,” he says over and over again, in Ciel’s ear, to the frantic bob of his throat, over the twitching grey of his eyelids. “You must breathe. You’ll make yourself ill.” 

Ciel gasps and writhes, choking on his own animal deluge of tears, clutching madly for Sebastian. He retches and hiccups, letting mouthfuls of frothy saliva drip from the corner of his mouth. That which Sebastian does not catch with his tongue slide down hot red cheeks and onto the blanket beneath him. Patiently, Sebastian smooths him out, though his heart is racing as he touches all that formerly forbidden skin, all that which is his again. 

He cups Ciel’s round and sticky face between his palms, flour adhering like snowflakes to the streaks of tears and spit, and pushes one long exhalation past his lips. “Match my breath,” he murmurs. “Let it go. There is nothing to run from.” 

Gradually Ciel slows his wild, sucking gasps, hands clenching and unclenching in Sebastian’s hair like two tiny heartbeats. “You...you,” is the first intelligible thing Sebastian discerns from the mess of dying sobs. “You are-- _supposed_ to never lie to me,” he finally manages, coughing. 

“And so I do not,” Sebastian tells him, using the tail of his own untucked shirt to blot Ciel’s face dry, to wipe the smudges of flour from his lips and cheeks. Ciel seems newborn small under him, small enough to fit in the wet hollow below his tongue, smaller than he has ever been.

“There is _plenty_ to run from. The world is wretched. Everything in it,” Ciel explains with explosive gravity, lashes dark and clotted with salt. His grip has slackened somewhat, hands dropping to tremble down Sebastian’s neck, one resting just above the thrum of his jugular. 

“Perhaps,” Sebastian admits, taking that hand in his own and bringing it to his lips so he can lick the salt from beneath Ciel’s nails before curls his fingers into a tiny fist, and slips the whole of it into his mouth for a moment. Then, he slides it out with a wet, lewd motion. “But you need not run from that wretchedness as long as I am here by your side. And I will always be here, young master.’” 

Ciel’s hand falls from the heat of Sebastian’s mouth, dropping to his own chest. He gazes up with wide and imploring eyes for a moment, one iris blown to near nothingness at the expense of his shimmering pupil, the other locked in perpetual stasis, five sharp points, encircled and never-ending. Then Ciel looks away, gaze skirting to the sheets crumpled and damp beside him. “You don’t understand,” he murmurs solemnly. 

But Sebastian does. He knows Ciel is stuck between worlds, belonging nowhere, neither fully human nor fully beast. He knows he is the thing which did this to him, condemned him to a life of willful loneliness, of solitude and vilification beneath his own heavy black wing. He smooths his thumb over the delicate arch of Ciel’s brow, then the corner of his marked eye where the skin is bunched and crumpled, pulling the lid shut over it so that he can kiss there. “You are damned,” he whispers. “And you are loved. They are not so different.” 

Ciel’s body shudders in a huge, purgative sigh, like the final breath of a soon to be drowned man. He does not fight; for there is nothing to fight against, no salvation when this is salvation, when the world is wretched and he belongs in the devil’s arms. “Sebastian,” he murmurs, reaching up to trace his butler’s cheek bones, down his neck and beneath his collar to his clavicles, back up again to rest upon his lips. Then he lets Sebastian kiss him and kiss him, the room growing humid and thick with the sounds of it. 

When Sebastian tries to push up his bed clothes and fix his mouth to the hot yearning place between Ciel’s thighs, he twists away and onto his stomach, face coloring. “I haven’t bathed properly in days, you certainly don’t want--”

“Oh, I certainly do,” Sebastian assures him huskily, gripping his waist so he cannot twist away. Then he buries his tongue in Ciel’s soft, dark crease, licking over his tailbone and lower still, holding his narrow hips tight between his palms. His heart stops at the sound Ciel makes, a raw ripped wail as he arches off of the bed and into Sebastian, skin so damp and bitter and musky under his tongue. 

Ciel tears at the sheets, grinding himself into the mattress and then into Sebastian’s warm palm, which finds him even as he bucks and quakes upon the bed. Sebastian holds him open with his other hand and pushes his tongue up inside, lost in the heady, dirty rage of it all, lost in the lyrical bends and rolls of Ciel’s hips. He decides in this moment he cannot live without it, tongue lashing deep into darkness. He cannot. 

Sebastian ruts helplessly into the bed, loving the taste of Ciel seven days without his touch, loving the taste of his loneliness and his longing. _You are damned_ , he thinks, gasping between deep, hungry thrusts of his tongue. _And you are loved_. Ciel is hot and pulsing in his palm, and it’s too much, it burns and Sebastian cannot live without it. He cannot. He comes into his trousers, groaning like an animal into the hot, wet slick of Ciel’s crack. He keeps tonguing him through the comedown, kissing and thumbing the tight rim of muscle, hips shuddering to stillness in the sheets. 

It’s only moments before Ciel cries out and locks up, braced like a bridge above the bed as he follows, coming in web-silk strands over Sebastian’s fingers. He’s a vision. Pale and squalid and convulsing, forcing Sebastian’s tongue from his body. 

Now slack and panting, Ciel doesn’t fight as Sebastian continues to lick him, rough and wet and hungry where he is still spasming, then gentler as he rolls him over and cleans the mess from his shuddering stomach, his own fingers. He tastes overwhelming, sharp, salty-bitter with youth, and Sebastian cannot stop. He mouths over him with tenderness and with thunder, lips sliding wetly where he’s still hard and twitching, teeth razing gently over flesh still red and sticky and sinful. Everything is his again, and he plans to suffocate in the exquisite splendor of it all. He plans to baptize, and he plans to drown.

When Ciel finally catches his breath, a laugh bubbles from his lips, feral and panicked, run through with stitches of veneration. He sounds mad, frenzied, and Sebastian crawls up his chest so he’s level with him, wanting desperately to witness his pain. Ciel covers both his eyes with the heels of his hands, a humorless twist of a smile beneath them like a gash in a prostitutes neck. 

Sebastian gently pries his wrists away and pins them to the sheets, peering down through his hair at Ciel panting beneath him, at his grin still manic and terrifying. After a few moments it fades and gives way to a slow, dazed rapture, lips softening, eyes sliding open to cast them both in soft violet light. Sebastian bends to kiss him with his own filthy mouth, and Ciel licks thoughtlessly up into him, flicking his teeth, sucking at his tongue. 

They break apart, Ciel still heaving like he has just been born. “Shall I draw you a bath now, young master?” Sebastian, voice low, barely there. 

Ciel’s head rolls loosely to the side, eyes wet and seeping as he gazes into indiscriminate shadow somewhere beyond Sebastian. “Yes,” he says, overcome. He closes his eyes and they leak down his cheeks. 

Sebastian thumbs away his tears and pulls the hem of his bedclothes down to cover him where he has been used, hooking one arm at his back and the other in the bend of his knees to lift him. He fells doll-fragile, porcelain and breakable like an emptied seed husk in winter as he drapes his arms around Sebastian’s neck. 

They pause on the way to the bath, turning into Sebastian’s room where he deposits Ciel’s limp frame onto his own bed. “I thought you were going to bathe me?” Ciel asks drowsily, rubbing an eye with the back of his hand. Then he sits up, interested once he realizes Sebastian is undressing. “What are you--” He falls silent, eyes fixed on Sebastian’s hands as they untuck his shirt from his waistband. 

Sebastian smiles and unbuttons his trousers smoothly, shucking them to the floor in a rustle of darkness. “I am. Just a moment, young master.” 

“Did you...?” Ciel whispers, face coloring like dawn creeping over the horizon as he peers down at the pile of black wool near the foot of the bed, at the pearly slickness cooling inside it. Sebastian watches the delectable realization slide over his face as he pieces together what has happened, recalls Sebastian’s mouth and hands on him. His eyes flutter closed and he sways, stunned to shamed silence by the immense power he holds over hell. 

“Yes,” Sebastian says curtly, tugging a crisp new pair of trousers from his closet and stepping into them, pulling the waistband up up and fastening the button, well aware of Ciel’s heated shuffling, his averted gaze. His body stings beneath it, feeling realized. He steps to the bed and stands between Ciel’s bent knees, smoothing his fingers down his still-sticky cheek, over the line of his jaw. “You command me,” he murmurs into Ciel’s ear. “You command me, and I am yours.” 

Ciel shivers then pitches into Sebastian, brow against his sternum, fists tight on his lapels. “Just take me to the bath,” He whimpers, in a voice Sebastian remembers from when Ciel was ten and still terrified, a trauma-wrecked little boy with nothing but a charred manor frame mired in dunes of ash. “Just clean it all off,” he mumbles, mouth open against Sebastian’s neck, tongue moving mindlessly, eyes wet and dripping again.

“Yes, my lord,” Sebastian says, lifting his dead weight again, arms tight around his ribcage. Ciel hides his face in Sebastian’s collar as they walk down the hall together in darkness, idly twisting a strand of inky black hair between his fingers, breath shallow and listless. Sebastian fits his fingers into the notches of his spine, holding him within the crook of one arm as he fills the bath. Prepared to baptize, prepared to drown.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in updates! I'm moving and the process is sort of eating my life. Anyway. More of this, thank you so much to all of you who have been diligently reading and reviewing. <3

Each passing day finds Ciel Phantomhive more like the villainous noble he claims to be, and less like a child playacting as one. He holds himself with a newly refined grace, a calculated coldness which makes even Sebastian, an ageless thing who knows Ciel’s interior like the first page of a well-worn book, forget he is but a boy. Sebastian now only catches glimpses of Ciel’s youth. When he curls up in his reading chair around his newest Poe volume, brows furrowed in concentration as he sucks absently at the sugar spoon from his tea. When his eyes glint with a ruddy, competitive barbary in the middle of a cricket game, even though Ciel is positively dreadful at cricket. Only then is Sebastian reminded that Ciel is so very young, in spite of being soiled, in spite of possessing that seemingly adult contempt. He was a child even before Sebastian’s black nails got to him, got beneath his skin. He is a child now.

The evening air smells thick and sweet with roses and the damp soil they grow from, the heavy organic perfume wafting in from the garden, rich and alive. Lady Elizabeth has just departed, gold curls bouncing out in the back window of the carriage as she leans out and waves her kerchief at Ciel, beaming grin splitting pink cheeks. Her mother, in a typical demonstration of strictness and severity, tugs her back into the carriage by her shoulder, and they both disappear. Ciel lets out an weary sigh as their carriage’s shape recedes into the orange horizon, like a gull spiraling in towards the sun.

“What a relief,” he hums, a fake grin disappearing from his face so abruptly he looks nearly inhuman without it, chilled and grey like a corpse. 

“You do not enjoy the company of your fiancé?” Sebastian teases lightly, a stride or so behind his master upon the manor’s stoop, hands fastidiously polishing Ciel’s ring, which the young master often does not wear when Elizabeth comes to visit. 

Ciel rolls his eyes, offers his hand to Sebastian without looking back at him so that he can slide the ring onto his thumb. Sebastian’s fingers linger as he does so, and Ciel lets out a nearly inaudible sigh before explaining, “It’s not that simple. It’s just terribly exhausting to have a child in the manor.” 

Sebastian drops his head, smirking behind the dark tumble of his hair. “Must I remind the young master that there is nearly always a child in the manor, unless he is sniffing about London for her Majesty the Queen?” 

It is then that Ciel whips around on his heel to look at Sebastian, eye flashing in the fading twilight. The air smells like roses, but beneath that, Sebastian can smell Ciel’s hurt, clean and bright and defiant, can smell his desire, which grows riotous and unbridled now that he has consciously submitted to the devil. Something has indeed shifted between them in the last month or so, and the child who used to allow Sebastian to manipulate and preen his body like the centerpiece bloom in a table bouquet now pushes back against him with teeth and bones and half-lidded eyes, with a hunger all his own. It is new, and it is thrilling. “Is that all you think of me as?”Ciel asks, voice cutting. “Or must _I_ remind my _butler_ that he has made quite sure this _child_ did not remain as such?” 

Sebastian stares back, face very carefully blank. It amuses him when Ciel claims his own innocence, as if it were something Sebastian took from him, sucked from his lips and swallowed away. “It is not all I think of you as, no.” He answers evenly. 

They regard one another, the air sharp and taut between them, eyes locked. Sebastian’s stomach flickers to life with heat; he feels sick with the strength of Ciel’s lust and his scorn, his hatred and his love. The depth and intensity of it is nearly adult, but the unchecked violence, its brash and messy passion, are indelibly poisoned by his youth. Sebastian cocks his head, gaze softening with fondness. He finds Ciel endlessly fascinating. 

“Don’t patronize me,” Ciel snaps, although there’s a smile quirking the corners of his lips up, smug and genuine. Only Sebastian is granted these true smiles, so small, so arrogant and cruel. “Come, Sebastian,” he adds curtly, waving two fingers in the air in a lazy beckon. “It’s nearly time this _child_ goes to bed.” 

Behind his own closed door, veils of Ciel’s pretense fall away, leaving him slightly younger, slightly softer as he drifts to sleep or to pieces beneath Sebastian’s hands. Still, it requires work on Sebastian’s part to truly tear him down, to crack the oyster’s shell apart and sip the brine, tease out the pearl. Sebastian devotes himself wholly to it. He believes that beyond his own desperate need to see Ciel broken open, bare without the layers of silk and linen and nobility, Ciel also _needs_ to be broken. That Sebastian’s use of Ciel’s flesh makes him whole and realized, that without him there is no north star and no compass, only miles and miles of black and turbulent ocean. 

He sits on the edge of his bed, propped up by two thin arms braced behind him, loose and flushed and damp after his bath. Sebastian pulls skin-warm stockings from his calves as he does every night, upon one knee between both of Ciel’s. Some evenings this gesture occurs quickly and chastely, just a butler undressing his master, nothing more. However, on nights such as this one, the ritual is fraught with tension, and Ciel _knows_ his power over Sebastian, he _knows_ it and he wields it like a sugar spoon, like a cricket mallet. Pushes until Sebastian cannot withstand the challenge any longer and breaks like a wave over Ciel’s body, takes him and uses him, changes him, strips him down to a blood-slick set of bones on the bed, crying and shaking and born again. 

Ciel extends his now naked foot, flexing it in the air beside Sebastian’s head before resting the heel atop his shoulder. He tangles his toes in the black silk of Sebastian’s hair, tightening them around a few stray strands and pulling. 

“Does my lord want something?” Sebastian scolds as he takes that delicate heel in his fingers and plucks it from his hair, like it were an annoyance, some insect buzzing about his ear. But his eyes are flashing crimson, belying the baleful intent which drives him. 

Ciel smiles without teeth, his face remaining smooth and free of ripples. “I love when you look at me like that. Like a dog begging for its dinner.”

Knives in Sebastian, twisting between the slats of his ribs. Ciel can be so invasive, stomach turning in his forwardness. It makes Sebastian ache for the ten year old who did not understand, who touched his fangs with shaking fingers and trusted he would never hurt him, who could not imagine a reason why anyone would ever crave pain. “You know I loathe dogs,” Sebastian murmurs, fingers climbing up the outside of Ciel’s narrow legs, mouth dropping to place an open mouthed kiss upon a single scab on his knee he got from a cricket game last week. 

“Because they follow their masters orders so very well?” Ciel asks, wincing as Sebastian’s tongue drags roughly across the tender, puckered skin beneath its crust of blood. He twists away, rolling onto his stomach and shooting a hazy look over his shoulder at Sebastian. “Or because they lack subtlety?” Ciel lacks subtlety himself, pushing his hips into the air and arching his back, a perfectly lewd display. 

Sebastian rises to stand over him, to brace his hands on either side of his little begging dog and sink his teeth into the pale slip of his neck, cascade of hair casting them both in darkness. He curls an arm under Ciel’s stomach, holds him flush against his ribcage to ride the vibration of his tiny huffs and mewls. “Because they are mindless,” he explains, lips moving against Ciel’s rabbit-fast pulse. “They move through life without thought or intent or purpose, but you, you,” he murmurs, fitting one hand beneath the hanging drape of Ciel’s untucked shirt, further still to push under the waistband of his shorts where his skin is hot and and quaking. “You know exactly what you’re doing to me.” 

Ciel says nothing, no lies and no admittances, no feigned innocence. He just sighs, shuddering below the insistent pressure of Sebastian’s flesh before he props himself up to his elbows, hiding a flushed face in his sleeve so that Sebastian cannot make out his expression. He rocks in time with Sebastian’s slow, deliberate thrusts. 

And this, too, is new. Sebastian has longed to be inside Ciel, to bisect him and crack him down the center, to fill him until he spills back out on the sheets because there is simply not enough room for all of hell inside the Earl of Phantomhive. He has longed for it, but found it nearly impossible, Ciel’s body too tight and hot and overstimulated to contain more than a few well slicked fingers. But Ciel has grown, loosening from repeated exposure perhaps or just steeling himself against pain more convincingly. Regardless, everything changes. 

Sebastian fits inside Ciel like he was made to, and Ciel is fashioned to be rifted apart. He sobs and bucks and grimaces his way through it, fists in the sheets and nails in Sebastian’s back, thighs as stiff and bloodied as the day Sebastian contracted him once they finish, like they had fought some near fatal battle. _Do you want me to stop?_ Sebastian wrenches out again and again while he rides him, finding words buried somewhere deep in the mess of his hunger, hands tight enough to draw bruises to the skin of Ciel’s frail wrists. And again and again the answer, _no, please. no_. Even as he bleeds and weeps Sebastian can feel how profoundly he needs it, the stark, blind craving as his body splits and gives to accommodate him.

Sebastian is thrilled to have gained new territory inside his favorite possession. He unbuckles Ciel’s shorts and tugs them down around his thighs both to expose him and bind him, free hand prodding into the slack wetness of his mouth to collect. “My lord,” he rasps against the dip of his spine. Ciel spits. 

With tremulous fingers Sebastian smears his saliva up into him, groaning at the way he twitches and opens, increasingly accepting of the intrusion each time Sebastian pushes him to that dark corner and will not back down. He’s infernal and smooth inside, too smooth to be truly human and not for the first time Sebastian wonders if this is all some brilliantly constructed dream of the perfect soul, and not the real thing because _how,_ how could it be real? How could centuries of starvation and tedium end in this? 

Ciel cries out, thighs attempting to splay inside the tangle of his shorts, forehead grinding into the still made bed. “Please,” he mumbles, swallowing thickly. “ _Please_.” 

“And who is begging for his dinner now?” Sebastian says in a shaking voice, freeing himself from his trousers and letting them drop below his knees, hot and hard and aching as he slides against Ciel but not yet inside, just into the crease of him where he’s spit-wet and hot and wanting. He mouths and bites up Ciel’s bicep and bony shoulder, to his neck and the fine angle of his jaw, too hard and too rough, surely leaving half-moon indentations of teeth, of inhumanly pointed incisors. He cannot get enough. There is not enough time, not enough anything. Not enough of Ciel’s soul in his flesh to stave away the hunger.    
“I just,” Ciel pants nonsensically, beside himself, rutting his hips into the mattress in a graceless circle. “Just please. Make it hurt like the rest of me.” 

Sebastian thumbs over the flushed shell of his ear then follows with his tongue, tasting skin briny with sweat. _Like the rest of me_ he thinks, heart shuddering to a nauseating stop inside his ribs before lurching into the race again. “As you wish, young master,” he murmurs. Then he aligns himself, reaching between his legs to pull Ciel apart, to rub against twitching muscle. There’s some resistance, some wet and fruitless sliding and _then,_ there. He sinks to the hilt in perfect, burning agony, Ciel sobbing and collapsing under him like a bridge with its cables cut. There they lie, Sebastian catching his breath, Ciel limp and hiccuping beneath him.

When Sebastian moves Ciel follows, gritting his teeth. He’s soft and confused, unable to sustain an erection when his body is so terribly alight with sensation, so burnt and full of fissures. Sebastian doesn’t care; he can’t. He knows this is what Ciel wants, and his job is to follow his master’s wishes, to be his and his alone, to pray at the wreckage of his alter. Ciel is impossible around him, a heat too pure for earth, and he cannot thrust in or out just yet without coming so he stays here, holding Ciel upright upon all fours, kissing all the skin he can reach. 

Again, a voice like a child lost in the darkness. “Please,” Ciel mumbles, head hung, hair swaying in time with desperate, ragged breath.

“Yes,” Sebastian hisses, mouth open on the flickering tendons in Ciel’s throat. He steadies one palm on the mattress, then lets himself go. It is bliss, and it is anguish. He does not know who he is when he’s like this, he knows nothing save for the vice tightness pulling him ever deeper, the air peppered with those baby-shrill screams. His hand gives way to thick-clawed talons upon Ciel’s wrist, slicing into butter paleness, drawing blood and an animal wail before it flickers weakly back into a semblance of humanity. 

He reaches up between Ciel’s legs, where he is soft but twitching, hot rivulets of urine dripping down his pale thighs. “I can’t help it,” Ciel mumbles, pushing himself along Sebastian’s length, swallowing him into darkness. “I can’t help it.” Tears drip to the sheets between his elbows, and Sebastian cannot take it anymore. He holds onto Ciel with his teeth like a tomcat, and comes.

Ciel rides the waves of it, arches his back as Sebastian slams into him, face wet with tears and spit as his body sucks Sebastian deep inside like a sinkhole. “Please,” he continues to whimper, buckling under Sebastian’s weight, until, finally, “Yes, _yes_ ,” as he’s filled to the point of stinging overflow. Eventually he crumples, rippling like white sail, a flag called surrender and his voice a single, mournful peal lost to the rage of war. 

Sebastian stays inside him, still hard and pulsing for a moment before he begins to soften, anchored to his body by a solitary point of unimaginable heat as Ciel sobs and shakes around him. He smooths his hair away from his face, combing his fingers through the sweat damp mess of it, tracing his brows and his lips. “My lord?” he asks gently. 

“Hm,” Ciel mumbles, licking absently at Sebastian’s fingertips. It is enough of an affirmation, so Sebastian rises unsteadily to his knees, sliding from Ciel’s flesh in a slick of his own seed. Ciel gasps and hisses, rolling onto his side and reaching for himself, feeling gingerly around his tailbone where he is bruised and stinging and tender. 

Sebastian settles between his thighs, patiently working him to hardness once again using his mouth. He slides his tongue around the sloppy-smooth mouthful, licking away everything, all the saltiness, all the bitterness, until there is nothing but his own spit and Ciel’s clumsy, stilted thrusts up past his lips, his choked mewls and hums. Sebastian touches Ciel everywhere as he sucks him, broad terrible hands roving over his stomach and his thighs and his ribcage, down to his knees and up to his throat again to squeeze him as be bends, bends and breaks and comes with a hoarse, abraded moan. 

He looks crucified once Sebastian finishes with him, splayed in a crude letter X with half his clothes still in disarray around his limbs. Sebastian sits between his bent knees, razing his nails gently over the scab rough and coarse upon the right one, eyes moving over the skyline of his throat with quiet adoration. Then, he uses his black index nail to pry the edge of the scab from the marbled pink skin beneath it, peeling it off in its entirety before placing it in his mouth. Ciel winces and whines, eyes fluttering beneath pale shivery lids. Sebastian chews and swallows this bit of his master before he bends his head to lick away the fresh new blood which has just sprung to the surface, like ink pooling from the point of a quill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think eating someone's scab is an unspeakably romantic thing to do, just fyi.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short and thoughtful chapter. More changes to come. Also, I apologize for the slow updates! Moving has eaten my life up.

They walk down the breezeway of the stables together, Ciel’s riding boots squeaking like well-worn leather still does, his eyes cast to the ground to avoid the smears of recently mucked manure. He’s wrinkling his nose up at the smell, but Sebastian does not mind it. It’s quiet and dark and cool the stables, and something about the rich, sweet scent of horse and leather and straw is calming in that it is oppressively natural. It smells like the world before humans began planting seeds in the dirt and building fences, when they still ran in packs and wore skins cured in salt, when it was simple to find a meal as a demon, though infinitely less satisfying. Sebastian enjoys the smell of the stables, but he loves the taste of greed far more. He feels faintly nostalgic and wistful as he follows his master. 

Ciel’s heels click ahead of him, arresting just outside the largest box stall where his new horse stands like a statue, spectacularly black and elegant. She is a prize Warmblood mare Sebastian had imported from Germany, impeccable bloodlines and a coat like flint, as blue-black as the Phantomhive ring on a cloudy evening. She turns to regard them warily with two wise, dark eyes, huffing through a soft, whiskery nose, ears twitching. Smelling the sugar cubes Sebastian pocketed for their meeting, she snuffles closer to them, vast ebony neck arched like a bow. 

Her front hoof knocks against the stall door and Ciel flinches at the sound, hanging back somewhat behind Sebastian. “This is quite a large mount for me, don’t you think?” He asks skeptically, 

Sebastian smiles, thinking of Ciel’s thin legs splayed wide over the beast’s back, the ache he will have to knead from his thighs any evening following a hunt. He lets his eyes rove over Ciel, who looks absurd in his expensive riding outfit, the high-waisted breeches and crisp, tailored hunting jacket drawing attention to the girlish slimness of his build. Sebastian wants to reach for him, crushing all his angles and planes to him so that they converge amid this cool darkness, bathed in the scent of alfalfa and hoof polish. Instead, he clears his throat. “The young master is such an accomplished rider I did not think to consider size when selecting the ideal mount,” Sebastian explains, ducking into a shallow bow. “Her size will provide you with an advantage during hunts, as she will be able to easily clear the jumps your pony-”

“Enough. I understand,” Ciel cuts him off, a slight flush to his cheeks. Though the Earl of Phantomhive _is_ an accomplished rider, it is only due to Sebastian’s strict and frequent lessons, and regardless of the skills he has learned as a result, he still possesses a wariness around horses, especially draft breeds and Warmbloods. _They’re just so big and stupid. I cannot trust them_ , he told Sebastian once, when prompted to elaborate on his leeriness. Sebastian suspects that its something more than just a lack of trust, however, and more so a manifestation of Ciel’s mortality. That horses are wild and unpredictable and vast, and Ciel must admit his smallness and his vulnerability when atop one. The Earl of Phantomhive attempts tirelessly to feign fearlessness, but Sebastian can see through the fractures, like cracks running through china and allowing tea to seep out. 

“I did, however, take disposition into account,” Sebastian tells him, sliding gloved fingers into his pocket to fish out the sugar cubes. “And her trainers assured me she is as gentle as she is beautiful. Finnian has echoed the sentiment.” 

“I see,” Ciel says quietly, body still tense with trepidation. His visible eye is narrowed, peering cautiously out between the clumps of hair which curl like feathers around his face, trapped against his brow by the brim of a hunting cap. The horse regards him with equal scrutiny, ears pricked forward in her own heedful curiosity. It’s clear she’s sympathetic to his nervousness, tail swishing back and forth in irritation even though there are no flies this early in the spring. 

“My lord, if you will,” Sebastian suggests, reaching for Ciel’s hand and placing a sugar cube in the center of it. “I know she is not your old pony, but he was beginning to get arthritic in his cannon bones and--”

“Sebastian. Stop,” Ciel barks, silencing him again. He glares over his shoulder, tightening a fist around the crumbling lump of sugar. “I am not afraid of a horse.” To prove his point he extends his hand to the mare, offering her the treat and cringing as her velvety nose nuzzles into his open palm, lips and wide, washcloth tongue cleaning the sugar from his skin. “Ugh,” he mumbles once she’s done, holding his wet hand away from him as if it has touched something filthy. “Sebastian.” 

Sebastian procures a kerchief to wipe the residual sugar granules and sloppy horse drool from Ciel’s narrow fingers. Meanwhile the horse paces back and forth in her stall, nodding her head eagerly now that she knows there is sugar to lick up. Her coat flashes like obsidian, reflecting the sunlight which filters in from the breezeway, and Sebastian is pleased that such a pure darkness can occur in nature. Once he is done cleaning Ciel’s hand he plucks the other sugar cube from his pocket, offering it to mare. She takes it delicately then nickers in gratitude, leaning across the stall door to snuffle into Sebastian’s hair before nosinf about his waistcoat for more. He strokes her well-muscled neck, admiring the sheer power tempered within. 

“Why do animals _like_ you so much?” Ciel sneers, crossing his arms over his chest. “I thought they were supposed to sense evil. That dogs barked when they saw ghosts, or horses refused to cross hallowed ground, you know. I did not think them to be so trusting and stupid.” 

“He does not mean what he says, my lady,” Sebastian says to the mare, holding her smooth black cheeks between his palms and staring sincerely into coffee-brown eyes. She drops her head, unimpressed, and mouths curiously at the chain of the pantry key. He can sense Ciel’s eyes upon him, cross and disapproving that he would think to ignore him in favor of consoling a horse. He sighs, amused. “Perhaps it is the other way around, and they are only trusting because they posses a greater intelligence than that of humans,” he recommends, smiling over his shoulder at his master. 

Ciel rolls his eyes as Sebastian continues. “After all, nature is not the embodiment of innocence, as some like to believe. Nature is cruel, but also unflinching in what it takes. We do not condemn wolves for hunting rabbits, nor do we pity the rabbits as they run and die. It is merely what they do, how they survive, or how they do not. Fauna have far more in common with demons than they do with humanity, young master.” 

Ciel sighs, turning back to his horse, her shining coat and slender black legs, rippling with muscle. Built to run, to survive, and eventually, to die. He reaches out and tries to pet her neck but she swivels away from him, too interested in snuffling into Sebastian’s pockets in search of sweetness to pay him mind. “She does not like me,” he observes. 

“You did call her stupid,” Sebastian says gravely, licking his gloved finger and stuffing it into his pocket in order to collect the last bits of sugar still hiding in its folds. “Your hand again, my lord.” 

Ciel obeys grudgingly, holding out his only recently cleaned hand for Sebastian to rub the rest of the sugar into it. Then he slides his gloves up Ciel’s forearms, steadying his elbow and guiding it towards the horse. For a moment she hangs in suspension, head raises as she sniffs at the air, still uncertain of Ciel’s intent. “Children are no more the embodiment of innocent than nature is, young master,” Sebastian murmurs into Ciel’s ear, lips brushing gently over his temple. Ciel pretends it is not happening, eyes narrowed and still fixed upon his new steed, her glory and her uncertainty. Finally, she deems him trustworthy, dropping her muzzle to his fingers and licking the sugar away. Ciel releases a held sigh, his chest expanding and falling into Sebastian, who is steady and solid behind him.

The mare returns to snuffling about their clothes, though she focuses more intently upon Ciel this time, as he is her more recent benefactor. Sebastian remains behind Ciel, gently taking his narrow white wrist which is protruding from the sleeve of his hunting jacket, steering his hand until his fingertips dust across a coarse black mane. Ciel pets his new horse solemnly. “I suppose she is a fine creature,” he admits as she nuzzles his stomach, pushing him deeper into Sebastian, who breathes deeply from Ciel’s hair, feeling like this is somehow a secret, an accident for them to touch this way in the stables.

“Tack her up in my trail saddle. I want to see if I got my money’s worth,” Ciel decides, threading his fingers through her forelock and tugging gently. 

“Yes, my lord,” Sebastian says, lips dropped in quiet to worship to Ciel’s still fear-quick pulse, where there is no nature and no innocence, just a crust of earth within which to plant seeds and build fences.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! My wonderful, wonderful partner, who patiently read every draft of this story and put up with me when I was writing for hours obsessively, and who is my best reader and biggest supporter, thinks the second half of this chapter is the hottest thing in this story. Because of their preference for it, I tend to like it, too. I hope you enjoy it, too!

chapter 15

He’s a twisted old man, grey and grizzled like the root of a long-dead shore tree, petrified by sand and salt. Most of the criminals the Queen’s Watchdog dispatches are street-hardened, shrewd and sturdy, but this man seems like a specter, the stuff of fiction or fairy tales. He reminds Sebastian of an ancient beast offering three wishes from beneath a bridge. Perhaps this is why he is stunned by his speed and his aptitude, why the man manages to catch the devil off guard and stab wildly at the Earl of Phantomhive, who is not fearless but is often foolish in his complacency, beneath hell’s wing. 

Ciel doesn’t even realize what happens at first. His mouth falls open, black-gloved hand clutching wildly at his left arm, where he finds a tear in his fine tweed overcoat. He looks briefly outraged that someone has torn his sleeve, then his fingers come back blood-sticky, and he drops to his knees. 

Sebastian sees the flash of the blade, crude and curved. He sees the drops of crimson falling to the earth like tears; he feels the tempest reaching a crescendo in his chest before it consumes him.

“Kill him,” barks the Earl of Phantomhive, seconds after Sebastian has already ripped the tarry black heart from a frail ribcage. The man falls to the ground with a sick crunch, like falls leaves beneath carriage wheels. He is dead before he hits the cobblestone. 

Ciel makes a wordless sound, savage and cruel as he staggers to his feet, reaching behind him with his good arm to wrench his pistol from its thigh holster. Small body heaving, he empties a round of shots into the withered corpse, until his shins are splattered in blood and there is nothing but a wreckage of bone and hair and gore before him. Sebastian watches, thinking it’s possible that he has never loved Ciel more than he does in this moment. 

A thick cockney accent echoes down the alleyway, chasing them like hounds on a hunt. Sebastian remembers that the old man had been flanked in security when they last interrogated him, still unsure if he was actually the one responsible for the stabbings they were investigating for her Majesty. Sebastian bears down upon Ciel, whose lips are still curled over his teeth, frozen in affront. 

“Young Master,” he says, sweeping Ciel’s furious, bleeding body into his arms, propelling them up into the night with his legs. “We must take our leave. You are in no condition to fight rationally.” His tailcoats flicker like flags in the darkness as they alight upon the roof, and Ciel struggles against him, throat raw over gargling screams as Sebastian draws him tighter, crushing his damaged arm between their bodies. 

“And that is _your fault_!” Ciel cries out, freeing a hand from Sebastian’s lapel momentarily with the intent to strike him, but thinking better of it as Sebastian pushes off again, using the spines of London architecture to flicker through the city like a bat. Ciel has no choice but to hang from him, lest he fall from his arms, spiraling to his death on singed wings. “Where _were_ you? You allowed that _pathetic old creature_ to humiliate me, cut my arm and _tear my jacket_ ,” he seethes, ripping himself out of Sebastian’s arms once they alight upon the stoop of the townhouse, nearly stumbling to the ground at he clutches his elbow, hissing. 

“My deepest apologies, young master,” Sebastian says, head tilted in humility. “I did not expect such athleticism from a street urchin.” 

Ciel’s gaze is fierce and cutting. “You are supposed to _protect me_ ,” he mumbles, nearly pitching into the door as he takes a step. His face is blanched, almost green in the moonlight as he retches a mouthful of frothy spit between his feet. He clasps a hand over his lips, breathing heavily to keep from emptying his stomach entirely, and Sebastian shakes his head, making a quiet tsk sound with his tongue. “Such a fragile master. Let’s get you inside.” 

Sebastian ushers him into the foyer, stripping the torn jacket from his quaking arms, examining the tender gash just above his elbow ditch. It’s shallow but wide, Ciel’s pale flesh parted into a gasping mouth, soft and puckered like curdled cream. Sebastian gently thumbs the blood away, letting his gloves soak up the excess before he properly cleans the wound. Ciel shakes, glaring at him with spectacular cruelty, teeth gritted against the sting. 

“ _Sebastian,_ ” he grinds out, bracing himself against the wall to prevent from crumpling to the floor beneath the swell of oncoming shock, struggling to pull his eyepatch off. There is a brilliant flash of violet, and Sebastian’s hand is suddenly aflame. “Sew it up before I lose more blood and _faint_ ,” Ciel orders, a mess of trembles. 

“Right away, my lord,” Sebastian obeys, bending to carry Ciel up the stairs and to the master bathroom. He can sense the beginnings of defeat in his feather-light body, a subtle limpness in his arms where they drape about Sebastian’s neck, as if his flesh _knows_ there is no real fight, no way to survive without Sebastian, and no way to defy his savior. A huge breath makes him shiver, and his face tilts into Sebastian’s shoulder, where he stays until he’s deposited upon the counter’s edge. 

Sebastian unbuttons his vest and ruined dress shirt beneath that, tongue sweeping over his lips as it always does when Ciel has spilled this much blood before him, when he can smell the sharp, metallic truth of his interior. With hunched shoulders and an uncontrollable chatter to his teeth, Ciel sits upon the counter, wincing at Sebastian carefully peels his shirt from his pale, blood-spattered chest, hair hanging and obscuring the twisted red mess o his facef . “It hurts,” he says plainly, white like the moon save for the black cling of his gloves. He prods about the wound with black-silk fingers, cringing. 

“Understandably so,” Sebastian says, catching that tiny hand in his own and peeling the glove off, tossing it to the floor like a snake’s shed skin. “It is a considerable wound.” 

“No thanks to you,” Ciel grumbles. 

Beneath the sink there is a medical kit, and from it Sebastian fishes out a roll of gauze, a curved needle and bottle of iodine, its label stained in blots of orange. He rolls up his sleeves and tugs off his own gloves before throughly lathering and rinses his hands, stealing glances at Ciel as he does so. The display renders him dry-mouthed and hungry, so much gooseflesh, so many smudged pink fingerprints like lipstick kisses. He threads the needle, dips its tip in the iodine to sterilize it, eyes still fixed upon his young master. 

“Are you ready, my lord?” he asks, wiping down the areas surrounding Ciel’s wound, leaving streaks of amber over pale skin. There’s a sharp, pained intake of breath at the sting, and Ciel reaches for Sebastian, making fists in his starched collar. 

“Not yet,” he forces out between his teeth, face rubbing insistently against Sebastian’s chest. “And do not think I fear the pain. I don’t. I’m just terribly dizzy.” 

If Sebastian had not just cleaned his hands, he would push his fingers through Ciel’s hair, into his mouth, into his wound. He would touch him all over, mapping over the places his mouth will settle when the candles are snuffed, memorizing topography. Instead he inhales steadily, rubbing his lips and chin against the crown Ciel’s head, the delicate cowlick of silky, sweat-damp hair that grows there. “You are losing blood quickly,” he tells him. 

“Fine,” Ciel snaps, taking a great shuddering breath and sitting up straight. “Fine, just do it. If I pass out and fall off the counter it’ll just be another grievance stacked up against your dubious performance tonight.” 

Sebastian deftly unbuttons his shirt down to his sternum so that he can free a lithe, toned shoulder. Ciel stares at it, blinking slowly, as if he has never seen Sebastian’s skin before in spite of the still-healing tracks from his nails, visible just over the crest of his scapula. “Might I suggest keeping something in your jaw,” he offers. “You can deflect pain by biting down.” 

“By something to you mean _you_?” Ciel asks, managing a weak, watery smile even though his eyes are clouded “How perfectly subservient.” But he drops his head to Sebastian’s shoulder anyway, opening his mouth and tonguing over the definition there, his breath hot and shallow as Sebastian holds the edges of his wound together and makes his first incision with the needle. 

The bite is instantaneous, deep and twisting as Ciel bucks and cries out, stifled against Sebastian’s skin. Sebastian sews quickly and skillfully, tugging the gash into a neat, raised red line as Ciel’s teeth dig into his shoulder, leaving a vibrant bloodless crescent of white. It’s a good, clean pain and it does not phase Sebastian nor distract him from his work, although there is a heat building and thrashing in his gut. He braces himself against it, keeps his fingers moving. “Only a few more stitches, young master,” he says gently, lips soft against Ciel’s ear. 

“Hurry up,” Ciel groans, voice throughly muffled around Sebastian’s shoulder. 

Sebastian finishes, neatly tying off the stitches before disinfecting the whole of Ciel’s upper arm with iodine. He keens, eyes shut tight against the pain, gnawing at Sebastian like he means to separate flesh from bone. Sebastian longs for the marks he will inevitably leave there, the bruise he will allow to heal ad inefficiently as a wound in human flesh, just as he leaves all the marks Ciel makes upon him. 

Ciel trembles against him, a testament to the mankind’s fragility, is wild, beautiful arrogance. His skin is puffy with inflammation, swollen beneath Sebastian’s fingers and the yellow stain of iodine as Sebastian takes the roll of gauze and wraps it tidily around Ciel’s bicep. Ciel breathes heavily into him, body slackening against his shoulder, jaw no longer tight and clenching as he licks absently at the indentations left from his teeth. “Did I hurt you?” He whispers. 

“A bit. I am impressed by the Watchdog’s bite, I must say,” Sebastian says, tucking the bandage into itself. 

“Good,” Ciel huffs, sitting upright and swaying. He shakily wipes off his mouth with the back of his hand as Sebastian shrugs his shoulder back into his shirt, skin stinging satisfyingly as it brushes against the crisp cotton. 

“Allow me to prepare you some brandy in hot milk, young master,” he offers, helping Ciel off the counter, as he is still quite wobbly and pale now that the ordeal is over, the color and spitfire drained from him. 

Ciel collapses into bed before finishing his drink, letting the last inch or so sit upon his armoire and cool as he drags Sebastian to lie beside him, curling his bitten arm around his own heaving chest. He is sloppy and slow-moving with brandy and pain exhaustion, silently allowing Sebastian to place feathery kisses over his neck, skin usually too ticklish and sensitive to sustain anything save for teeth and nails. “Sebastian,” he huffs out, the name sounding so fond and doting he would surely be embarrassed to hear it were he in his right mind. “Do you truly care for me? Or am I just some some _cake_ you’re making, one that hasn’t baked all the way through yet?” 

Sebastian laughs and it rumbles through Ciel’s pulse like a seismic tremor. “You are everything to me, young master. Far more than a mere cake.” There is no other way to explain the complexity of their relationship to him, there is no other word to describe the mess of love and craving and beauty Sebastian has baked into this grand confection, the extensive list of rare and expensive ingredients he is still collecting to complete. There is nothing but everything. He smooths his fingers against Ciel’s cheek, resting the tips just below the lower lid of his marked eye. 

Ciel closes his eyes in response, letting out a deep breath and further softening into Sebastian. “It’s hard to tell sometimes. I know you enjoy when I am in pain. It’s confusing. You frustrate me,” he complains, a furrow in his brow. 

Sebastian raises his eyebrows, his tongue lapping at the line of Ciel’s jaw as he pauses thoughtfully. “I do enjoy witnessing your pain. However, that does not mean you are of no import to me. Taking pleasure in one’s pain is just another expression of love” he explains, certain the depth of his devotion is an unspeakable thing, a truth which transcends words. He tries to send it through his hands, his teeth, so that Ciel can absorb it through his skin and understand it that way, the grave, murderous terror of it. 

For Sebastian, there is no difference between sex and pain, or between love and slaying. He wants everything from Ciel, he wants him all the time and in every way, and he will take whatever fraction of that he can steal in each moment of their time together, until that final day, that truest consummation. That is the nature of a demon’s love. But humans favor cages, they adore distinction and language and other meaningless structures to limit and define the vastness of feeling by. 

“I know, I know,” Ciel sighs, pushing Sebastian’s mouth away so that he can breathe, hands falling limp to either side of him in overstimulation. “It’s just...not how parents are. How humans are at all, or how they claim to be.” He turns to look Sebastian in the eye, pupil wide and unguarded, contract seal pulsing faintly with cold light. Then he reaches out, fingertips dusting down the snow-smooth plane of Sebastian’s cheek. “It’s hard to _tell_. If you love me or hate me or care for me or want me dead.”

His breath smells sweet and fiery with brandy, his touch so impossibly sincere. Sebastian cocks his head, moved by Ciel’s black and white human understanding, his penchant for prisons and words and distinction. “Young master,” he starts, letting a black-tipped thumb slide across the infant pout of Ciel’s lower lip. “Why must all those things be so different?”

The walls and London’s muffled city-sounds beyond them fall to dust, forgotten, and Sebastian licks into Ciel’s mouth before he can say anything else, fingers moving gently over his bandage, constricting until he can feel the raised, irritated line of Ciel’s wound throbbing into his own palm. _I could take it from you now,_ he thinks, sucking on Ciel’s small, helpless tongue, digging his fingers into tender flesh. _But I won’t_. He proves his restraint time and time again, failing to tear sutures asunder and drink from fresh wounds, kissing Ciel until he cannot breathe, but does not suffocate. _Not yet_. 

\---

They hold a ball at the Phantomhive manor in early December. In spite of the event’s social and political success, Ciel only just makes it through the night without creating a scene. He is dreadful at parties, off-putting and sulky and cold. The guests expect playfulness from a Lord so young, costume parties, magic shows, entertainment and sweets and music. Ciel would deliver quite a dreary ball were it not for Sebastian, who manages to imbrue the night with the whimsy Funtom’s investors expect. Taxed by the effort of hosting such insufferable bores, Ciel does little to assist him. 

Lady Elizabeth is louder than usual and clings with more ferocity than usual, and the Duchess Brigitta Havensforth is spectacularly drunk, responsible for accidentally upending the chocolate fondue fountain and the unsightly demise of Sebastian’s artfully crafted ice-swan made just for the occasion. On top of such demanding presences, all the other guests are vying for Ciel’s attention, sharks ever circling, desperate to ask advice, pitch a new product, learn the secret to Funtom’s remarkable success. He escapes one just to fall into the clutches of another, Lady Elizabeth hanging from his arm and requesting a dance all the while. 

Sebastian assumes the role of the gracious host as the evening fades on, Ciel growing increasingly incapable of feigning hospitality. He is visibly tense, shoulders bunched around his ears, hand frequently rising to his throat to tug irritatedly at his cravat as if it is choking him. Sebastian knows Ciel is greatly vexed by social obligations, as they require him to appear as if he possesses morals, as if he cares about anything save for his own greed, his own revenge, his own butler. It’s not so difficult to fake virtue for a single meeting or lesson, but it is for a whole night full of eager, snapping jaws. 

Though amused and somewhat touched by Ciel’s inability to masquerade decency, Sebastian is also exhausted by the constant onslaught of responsibilities which keep falling onto his shoulders, and by the lingering glares Ciel is shooting at him every time their eyes meet across the room, like the ball is somehow Sebastian’s fault, like he is supposed to _do_ something to save Ciel from having to appear ethical, let alone courteous. 

Between the tittering crowd, the Duchess, and his fiancé, Ciel does not have a moment to himself or to Sebastian until the majority of the guests have either retired home or moved to the billiard room to sample Lau’s wares. He dismisses himself for bed sometime after midnight, teeth gritted in a weak pantomime of a smile as he addresses the remaining parties. Once he is halfway up the center staircase it falls away dramatically. 

Sebastian can smell the scorn upon him, sharp and acrid and beautiful. And this, this is the thing he created, his fountain of sweetness, his swan of ice. 

“I _loathe_ parties, they are an absolute waste of my valuable time and energy,” is the first thing Ciel says once his bedroom door is closed behind him, whole body trembling in frustration as he snarls. His fists clench and unclench at his sides as if he wants to break something, shatter his teapot, the urn in the corner, Sebastian’s cheekbone, anything. 

Before Sebastian has any time to respond appropriately, Ciel says the second thing, which obliterates any ability Sebastian may have possessed to be appropriate at all. “Sebastian,” Ciel barks, ripping off his eye patch and tossing it to his bed where it lands silently, a solitary spot of ink upon an entire white page. “I order you to hurt me.” 

Sebastian is stricken, eyes wide and a terrible crimson, bisected by the thin reptilian pupil like a staff parting the red sea. Thunderstruck, Sebastian’s control wavers and he feels blackness radiating from his spine in hungry tendrils, a shadow behind him which pulses and expands as Ciel snaps, “Did you _hear me_?” 

The Earl of Phantomhive, in all his ruffles and silk, takes a step towards Sebastian, whose hand is burning corrosively, throbbing in time with Ciel’s heart. “Yes, my lord,” he answers, throat thick with saliva. It’s a dangerous order, and he struggles to stay human against the magnitude of it. Ciel’s eyes are cold and contemptible as they lock onto Sebastian, but in spite of the sting there is fear staining them, a genuine and reckless horror, as if he knows the immensity of what he asks. _I am prepared to endure whatever you choose to do to me_ , it says. _I am yours_. 

Sebastian comes undone, sweeping in towards Ciel amid a tide of smoke, black and arcane. With obsidian talons he grips his young master by the shoulder the hip, lifting him easily and slamming him into the wall of his bedroom so hard wood cracks behind him and he cries out in strangled pain, head thrown back to expose the tender line of his throat to drawn fangs. 

Mouth open, he rips down to Ciel’s sternum, singeing holes through his lavish party clothes to burn the flesh beneath. Ash drops between Ciel’s feet, dying embers and he’s starting to retch but does not seem to care, body canting needfully up into the fire of Sebastian’s cruel palms, spit dripping down his chin as he struggles with breath. 

Sebastian wars with himself, attempting to rein in his power and his shadow so that the raw silk of Ciel’s soul does not end up torn and scattered like the entrails of a gutted pheasant. _Not yet_ Sebastian thinks, vision unclouding to reveal two seemingly human hands griping Ciel’s delicate shoulders with crushing force, palming beneath the remnants of his shirt and suit vest to drag black nails down the length of his back. _Not yet_. 

He feels uncooked bits of Ciel roll up under those nails, dead skin and torn skin and fine translucent hair and blood. Ciel rubs his forehead into Sebastian’s shoulder, praying mindlessly, godlessly, “ _Sebastian_ , Sebastian, Sebastian” like it is confession, teeth digging into the unforgiving slant of a clavicle. “Just make me, please. _Make me_ ,” he murmurs, stuck on an endless loop. 

Sebastian hurts him and he hurts him. He pulls his hair and flips him around, pressing the small, pliant body against the wall and fitting himself against the curve of his back like bow-hair to a viola, breath hot in his hair as he asks, “What do you want from me, young master. Just tell me what you want.” 

Ciel guides Sebastian’s yearning hands down to the waist of his shorts, helping him yank them down over the pert swell of his backside. They fall to a forgotten puddle of hunter green wool upon the floor, and Ciel pushes himself into the cradle of Sebastian’s hips, eyes brilliant with terror. “Inside,” he orders, making Sebastian’s nails raze into his hips, leaving jagged red valleys in their wake.

Ciel sucks on the fingers Sebastian forces into his mouth before he bites down on them, choked and silenced by cotton and spice. With little warning and a single palmful of spit Sebastian pushes into him, stifling the agonized scream which snags out of his throat, lace dragged over shattered glass. 

There, in his butler’s livery minus one glove, Sebastian takes Ciel against the wall. They rock against each other, Sebastian gripping what he can reach, mouth open against the wall above Ciel’s bent head, his thighs burning from the deep bend in his knees he must use to stay inside something so small, so close to the ground. There will be bruises upon his hips if they survive this. Somewhere, there is already blood, the faintest taste of copper on Sebastian’s tongue.

The room is filled with the sounds of wet slapping and broken sobs, knees cracking into the wall, the sounds of torment. Ciel is tight and throbbing inside, flesh instinctually trying to force Sebastian out even as he bucks back into his thrusts, bent in half, split and desperate. “Does it hurt?” Sebastian asks him, voice messy. 

Tears drip from Ciel’s chin as he nods. “It’s perfect,” falls from his lips, and Sebastian comes. 

Ciel yelps at the sting of it, Sebastian’s hands cupping his brow to keep him from slamming his head into the wall, fingers spread across stickiness, caught in tangled hair. They sway, Ciel giving Sebastian his entire weight as he crumples against him, held up by one sturdy arm around his middle. He hangs there for a moment, lurching with Sebastian’s aftershocks and his own desperate breath, one long string of drool hanging from his lips until it drops to the floor beneath Sebastian’s feet. 

They stay suspended together for a moment, Ciel doubled, Sebastian sliding from damnable heat, from Ciel’s still clutching insides. A small, wordless groan wheezes from Ciel’s lungs, and then he is silent. 

“Young master,” Sebastian says gently, eventually pulling Ciel upright, letting him droop, limp and weak against his own body. “You are quite exquisite. And also quite foolish.” 

Still panting, Ciel manages to speak, though his voice sounds crushed and feeble it is almost too fragile to behold. “I am only surviving as you taught me to.” 

“Yes,” Sebastian murmurs, holding Ciel close. “Even though you were afraid.” 

Ciel waves a limp, tremulous hand through the air in front of them before it falls weakly back to the steadiness of Sebastian’s elbow. “I wanted to test your loyalty. To see if you would kill me given the opportunity, or if you would just give me what I wanted.” 

“And?” Sebastian asks. 

Ciel shrugs clumsily in the cage of his arm, wavering bonelessly. “You are a very good butler,” is what he says. Between the lines Sebastian sees the truth, scintillating like frost. _I am yours._ Ciel’s head falls back and he gazes up at Sebastian in bleary reverence. “Thank you,” he whispers hoarsely, humbly. He looks terribly childlike, frail and featherless and wretched like a fledgeling fallen from its nest, wings nothing but useless stumps, pink skin so translucent that Sebastian can see every vein and artery woven beneath it. _Where is the little lord now,_ he wonders fondly, taking Ciel’s chin between gloved thumb and forefinger and applying pressure until his lips part like a begging beak. _Where is his throne and crown?_

Working the wetness to substance in his mouth, Sebastian produces a thick wad of saliva, foamy and white behind his teeth. Then he pushes it out with his tongue and it bubbles past his lips, hanging by an ever dwindling thread and swinging in time with Ciel’s breath until the thinnest filament ruptures. It drops sloppily into Ciel’s open mouth. “Swallow,” Sebastian says gently, thumbing sweat damp hair away from Ciel’s cheeks, admiring the wrecked bliss. Ciel does. 

Laughter echoes from somewhere in the manor, far away and unimportant. Again Sebastian spits and again Ciel swallows, blinking slowly, hands clasped like pigeon claws to the arm Sebastian is holding him steady with. His eyes are dazed, face slack and tear-streaked with overwhelm. Sebastian spits and spits, until his mouth is dry and Ciel can hardly stand, thighs cold and quaking, crusted in dried blood and trails of white.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some theology, some darkness. I am really, really obbsessed with Sebastian's demon form, just fyi. Also, this chapter contains some more frank, meta discussion about child abuse, for those of you who may want to tread lightly around such subject. 
> 
> \----
> 
> I was asked recently by a reader if I believe Sebastian is a 'child abuser' or if what he did/is doing to Ciel in the context of this story and in the manga/anime constitutes as child abuse, and my answer is, without a doubt, YES. I think the denial/obfuscation of that fact is what gets sebaciel defenders in trouble sometimes, and our unwillingness to really go into what this means for these characters, where the lines of consent are trampled upon, where the canon interrogates these things, etc. The truth is, we wouldn't be as interested and fascinated by Ciel and Sebastian's relationship if there wasn't an element of abuse, darkness, and perversion imbedded in its power dynamic. We wouldn't be as interested in them if they were happy, or healthy, two things they (in my opinion) CANNOT BE given who and what they are. 
> 
> Sebastian is, in the canon, consciously hurting, shaping, and manipulating a child emotionally, with an implied sexual overtone. Those are themes Yana is choosing to explore, at least symbolically. I don't think child abuse something she condones, nor do we as readers condone, or I, as a writer of fan works, condone. But I do think that they are themes worthy of exploring, at least symbolically, and in a purely speculative and fictional context. 
> 
> JUST SOME FOR THOUGHT! Thank you everyone whose been reading of contributing to discussion in the comment threads! You all are amazing.

Sebastian is dusting the Encyclopedia Britannica volumes in the Phantomhive library, Ciel curled up on his stomach beneath a blanket in front of the fire, eye patch resting beside his steaming mug of cocoa. He has a thick, leather-bound book on theology open before him, slender legs kicking thoughtlessly in the air as he reads, looking very much like a schoolboy with his rucked hair creased brow. Sebastian casts the occasional look in his direction, sweeping up the line of his back, fixing on the topmost knob of his spine which is half-obscured by the collar of his shirt.

He is a lovely thing to witness when he’s absorbed like this, the shadow of his usual fury relenting somewhat, the lines of stress and memory giving way to the singularity of focus. Sebastian loves knowing that beneath the boyish ruse there lies such cold blood, such a tortured heart. He loves being the one who owns it, who has built it from ash and promises, Pygmalion adoring his perfect rendering. 

Ciel eventually catches and smiles coquettishly, a smile Sebastian only sees when they are like this, together but in solitude. “And what are you looking at, butler?” he asks, the terrific blue of his eye dropping as he takes a sip of cocoa. 

Sebastian clears his throat, collecting himself with such ease he sees Ciel’s certainty falter, visibly wondering if he imagined being stared at in the first place. Sebastian times. “I was wondering if the young master’s studies proved interesting,” he explains, indicating towards the book between Ciel’s elbows, its thick parchment and the smell of dust.

“Not studies, just pleasure. I was curious,” Ciel says, rubbing his hand idly over the careworn page before him. Sebastian raises his eyebrows. The young master is an avid reader, his preferences ranging from military history to mysteries to gothic horror tales, things as dark and twisted but infinitely more delightful than his own reality, the safe and beautiful version of the two Underworlds he is collared to. Sebastian does not remember theology being among Ciel’s literary interests. _Dull_ and _trifling_ are words he used to describe such matters once, his fingers flicking through the air before him as if dispelling the smoke of liturgical incense. 

“Curious about God?” Sebastian inquires, amused. 

Ciel shrugs, eyes sliding closed in mock nonchalance. “About you.” 

Sebastian nearly laughs. “I can assure you that I am a far better source of such information than that book, my lord,” he tells him, head cocked as he tugs the thirteenth volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica set neatly from it companions, wiping the veneer of dust from the cover carefully. 

Ciel stretches, hooking his arm up under the blanket to draw it over his head like a hood. The lower hem of it creeps up his thighs as a result, revealing a new inch of skin. Sebastian thinks of the cream he stirred into Ciel’s cocoa only minutes before, thick and lily-white. 

“I didn’t want _your_ opinion of yourself. I wanted to see what this _book_ said,” Ciel explains, still shifting beneath the blanket in catlike languor. “I have no interest in your former contracts, or your life before this. Only a mild curiosity about the origin of evil.” He tosses a shiny wing of hair out of his marked eye, and their shared seal glows back at Sebastian, haunting and lilac. Ciel looks small and dark against his flickering backdrop of fire, and Sebastian wants to fold him into a digestible, compact shape like oragami. He wants to gather the blanket around him like and toss it over his shoulder, a sack of bones to salivate over later. 

Sebastian traces his fangs with the tip of his tongue, drawing in a measured breath though his nose. “And what does that book have to say?” He inquires, replacing the thirteenth volume in favor of the fourteenth. Ciel watches his gloved fingers dance across the textured leather spines with inhuman grace, quietly rapt. Then he shakes his head, tearing his gaze back to the book. 

“It proposes some interesting theories,” Ciel begins, taking a sip of cocoa and pausing for dramatic effect. “According to the Bible, the devil himself began as God’s most loyal angel.” He announces this like it is a novel theory he just discovered himself, rather than a point Sebastian has teased him with time and time again, the fantastical absurdity of the Devil’s supposed past. They regard each other, lips flickering with poorly concealed and partial smirks. 

“If I remember my biblical studies, he was cast from heaven for loving God too much,” Sebastian muses.

Ciel nods, the corner of his mouth still twisted up into a smug half-grin. “Tell me, Sebastian, did you end up here scavenging for souls because you loved _God_ too much?” He says snidely before he rests his lips against the edge of his mug, the pink slip of his tongue darting out to swipe the remaining bit of whipped cream off the top of his cocoa before disappearing again. Sebastian thinks of goading him, announcing that he had no idea theology made the Earl of Phantomhive so brazen. Instead, he returns to his book case with its half-dusted collection. When Ciel pushes in his direction, he enjoys holding back, as if he does not notice his efforts. He will reside in the shadows until Ciel comes to find him, or he will back him into a the grimmest of corridors, depending upon which of them is moving first. 

“So the story goes. But as I recall, it was not just that the Devil loved God, it was that he despised God’s pathetic creation. His children,” He offers, back still turned. 

“Humanity, yes,” Ciel drawls. “The devil refused to worship humanity as he worshiped God. Poor creature, cast down to live with the beasts he loathed.” His eyes flicker up and down Sebastian’s frame, from his shoes to the fly-away hairs tucked uselessly behind his ears. Ciel squints, as he often does when he really regards Sebastian with this type of scrutiny, when he is inevitably comparing him to his own father, cataloguing all their many similarities and differences, trying to make sense of the darkness from which he was born, and darkness by which is was raised, shoring all of that up with the darkness he has become. 

“Light bringer,” Sebastian says, eyes flashing in crimson, reminding them both needlessly of what he is, what a lie this body Ciel knows the feel and flavor of is, what a lie he tears his nails into at night, what a lie is he rift apart by.

Ciel shakes his head, sighing deeply. He suddenly looks very tired, his hand going slack where it was formerly clenched around his mug. The weight of Sebastian’s age bears down upon him for a moment, and he can do nothing but struggle to breathe beneath that tremendous stone, those unfathomable years. “I suppose that could not have been you, Sebastian. God’s angel. You are far too enamored with humanity to bring them light,” he muses quietly. 

Sebastian is surprised, a fleeting sensation in his chest, abruptly replaced by a tightness so painful it cannot be named. So many of the things he feels are too ancient and too inhuman to be spoken about or revealed. All he can do is ride their swell, beyond language, beyond understanding. It seems ironic that most of those feelings are wrought to the surface by something as simple and flawed as a human, and a human child at that. “Young master, you must know that the Bible consists of stories, nothing more.” 

Ciel’s head droops onto his book and he uses it as a pillow, breathing shallowly. Sebastian imagines walking towards him, pinning his throat to those yellowed pages with the tip of his shoe, until the skin grows hot and pink and a string of drool stains the paper. And then he will release him, watch him suck in desperate lungfuls of air, kiss the blue from his lips. 

“Of course I do,” he snaps. He drags himself into a sitting position, downing the rest of his cocoa and cringing at how cold it has become. He stares at Sebastian, both eyes narrowed with calculation. 

Sebastian stares back, placid and unmoved, wondering what the Earl of Phantomhive is thinking in that clever, whorled labyrinth of a mind he has. He slides another encyclopedia from the shelf. “Did you come to any conclusions about the origin of evil?” he asks lightly. 

Ciel combs fingers through his hair before shutting the book with a decisive snap. Dust billows from its pages, and the huff of air makes the fire flare brilliantly. “No,” he answers. Then something flashes across his child’s face, an unholiness which belies his true cunning even as he sits before the hearth with sweetness on his breath, a boy. Along with it the coyness returns, bringing a hectic color to Ciel’s cheeks. “Sebastian. Show me what you look like.”

His voice drags nails through Sebastian’s gut, and internally he collapses around it. However, he stands as still as ever, pushing the book back into its rightful place. “Goodness, young master. You wish for me to undress _here_? How improp-”

“You _know_ what I mean,” Ciel hisses, rising from sitting loosely cross-legged to slinking towards Sebastian on all fours, the blanket falling away completely to a crumpled horizon line behind him. Then he stands, striding purposefully to the great oak double doors to the library, which he locks with a click. The orange dance of flame grows richer, deepening with the sick burn of violet from Ciel’s shining eye. “Show me what you _really_ are. That’s an order,” he says, turning to face Sebastian. His jaw is set firmly, the conviction in it pure enough to burn Sebastian’s ungodly skin. He does know what he wants. 

“Yes, my lord,” Sebastian’s voice echoes from all around them, as if he is in the once-burnt hull of the manor itself, as if he is the wind, the iron ball and chain keeping the Earl of Phantomhive forever moored. With a frigid rage, eddies of smoky blackness swirl around the library, pushing icy talons through Ciel’s hair, beneath his clothes, and suddenly the fire dies with a weak hiss. “Is this what you want?” The ether asks in a voice like winter. “Is this the origin of darkness?” It surges around Ciel, swallowing him. 

He is cast in a smothering night, Sebastian blotting out the windows, surrounding his diminutive frame, making him the eye of every storm. In the midst of himself, terrible and sensation-sick, Sebastian feels Ciel’s pale skin come alive with gooseflesh. It makes the darkness swell in yearning. Ciel’s eye is the only light in the whole world, illuminating his round, stark, stricken face. 

His hand reaches out to touch, and with a coil of feather-dust Sebastian encircles that frail and trembling wrist. _I am no bringer of light_ , he sears into delicate flesh, nails cutting towards crucial veins. Then, in one solitary motion the tide breaks, all of the darkness falling to memory at Ciel’s feet. As the smoke clears, a the shape of a man in tailcoats emerges from its dissipation, one gloved hand braced gently at the small of Ciel’s back, the other still gripping his forearm. 

Ciel is panting like he has been beaten, pitching clumsily into Sebastian with fists in his lapels now that there is no chilling vapor embracing him from all directions, keeping him upright. “Young master, please. Allow me.” Sebastian releases him only to scoop him into his arms before he crumples like a corpse to the library carpet. He carries the limp, muted body back to his blanket, where he deposits him. Then he moves reignite the fire. 

“Was that what you wanted?” He asks as he stokes some still-flickering coals back to life, glancing over his shoulder at Ciel, who is rising unsteadily to sit. He sees him nod, though he is cradling his ice-burnt wrist, where the skin is dappled and pink from the devil’s grip, still shaking from the shock. 

Sebastian assumes he still stay quiet, stunned to silence by the beast he is bound to, but Ciel surprises them both by murmuring, “You’re beautiful,” almost under his breath, head hung in some variation of shame. Sebastian cannot see his eyes as they are hidden by his hair, but his face and neck flush violently, as if he did not mean to say such a thing. 

The fire is trying to stutter to life, smoking and crackling as Sebastian feeds it air with the bellows. “Thank you, young master,” he says, smiling even though Ciel is not looking at him. “I assumed you no longer saw beauty, after all you have suffered through.”

“Well,” Ciel huffs, falling back into his cocoon of blankets, still heaving and sated. “You were wrong.” With a sound like one great, exhausted exhalation, the fire reignites. 

\---

Ciel rarely calls Sebastian to his bed these days, and he spends his night sleeping as soundly as any child. Their trysts have moved elsewhere, to the edge of the billiard table, Ciel’s favorite love seat in the lounge, the floor of his study with the sunlight and the smells of spring filtering in like something from another universe, one where he is not bound to the devil. However, come nightfall their ritual has taken on a new shape. Sebastian dresses the Earl of Phantomhive for sleep, he tucks him into the blanched grave of his king-sized bed, then he blows out the candles and leaves his master’s quarters, just as any butler might. 

In spite of this pattern, Ciel will still occasionally start from his sleep, tangled in sheets damp with nightmare sweat, hand flying to the revolver on his bedside table and Sebastian’s name on his lips. It is only on those rare and shameful nights when he orders Sebastian to crawl in beside him, though he sometimes still requires that he lie outside the warmth of the comforter, so that their bodies are separated by layers of sheet and pockets of down. Sebastian does not mind. He’s amused by the absurd and fantastical book of hand-drawn rules Ciel uses to navigate their game, his selective and arbitrary obsession with propriety. As long as he still gets Ciel stripped and broken and begging, it does not matter to him where and when and how it happens. 

If Ciel needs to sleep the night through with a gun under his pillow to somehow prove to himself he is not completely dependent upon the devil to breathe, so be it. As long as Sebastian can come inside Ciel later, when he is too desperate to care what it says about him. He will lie here chaste and humble by his side, counting Ciel’s breaths until they give way to the rhythm of sleep. 

Now he stands in the corner of Ciel’s bedroom, cloaked in shadow, watching the shudders of fading fear run through Ciel’s body like seismic aftershocks. Ciel’s breath comes out shallow and staggering, marked eye so wide and luminescent Sebastian’s skin burns with it, hand stinging and obscured by his glove. He says nothing, just waits. 

Ciel sets the revolver down upon the bedside table, its barrel rattling against the wood in his still shaking hand. Sebastian can smell the sheen of sweat coating his palms even before he wipes them on his pillowcase, face ghost-pale and stricken in the night. “Did I call you?” he asks curtly, finally casting his gaze upon the door and therefore upon Sebastian, a flash of violet fire illuminating them both. 

Sebastian bows, dipping his body into an elegant right angle. “You did.” 

“Hm,” Ciel mumbles, flopping down onto his back and covering his eyes, so that the room falls prey to darkness once again. Sebastian traces the shape of his body, a little star in a sky of black. “Well. Now that you’re here, you might as well warm this bed for me,” Ciel drawls. He is attempting to sound bored, but there is still a capillary of fear wavering through his voice, the remnants of whatever terror he dreams of time and time again. Sebastian imagines reaching for it, plucking it between his thumb and forefinger like a heartstring, like the neck of a viola. 

“Would you like for me to bring you another blanket, young master? Or perhaps I could bring more coal for the fire,” Sebastian suggests, circling the perimeter of the room like a shark, spiraling ever-inwards towards the bed and the blood inside it,. His tailcoats flutter behind him, although there is no draft, no wind, no sigh. 

Ciel makes an impatient noise in his throat, and turns down the bed in a cloud-white billow of sheets, exposing the vacancy beside him. “Don’t be obtuse. You know what I mean.” 

“I try not to make assumptions regarding my master’s wishes,” Sebastian says politely, though no matter how artfully he disguises the teeth in his mouth, his hunger always shows through the mask. It’s a facade for Ciel’s sake, for the rule-book’s sake. So that the Earl of Phantomhive can feel as if he is adhering to his unreasonable fiction of decorum, his myth of civility. Sebastian does not bother to tell him there is no such thing when his heart, his body, his bed, his _soul_ belongs to a demon. He enjoys the flavor of his hypocrisy, and he suspects Ciel knows the truth anyway. 

“I see,” Ciel grumbles, patting the sheets beside him impatiently as Sebastian flickers out of his waistcoat. “Well I order you to stop playing. Just come here. I’m freezing.” 

“Very well,” Sebastian sighs in mock exasperation, dropping into the bed like a stone, like a feather. Immediately Ciel’s feet, ice-cold and flexing, burrow against him. 

“It does not matter, what I usually want or what I usually ask for,” Ciel’s voice comes out muffled against his chest as he rubs his lips against Sebastian. Then he pulls away minimally, just enough to fit his hands up into the space between them so that he can clumsily undo the first and second button of Sebastian’s starched shirt. It takes him an unreasonably long time, as buttons are not something he has much experience with. Once the new skin is exposed, warm and smooth and fashioned from the figments of his own desire, he rubs his cheek into it. “It only matters what I want now, in this moment. It’s not your job to anticipate my next move, or predict a gambit. You just follow my orders, you’re just a knight.” 

“Yes,” Sebastian admits, raising an eyebrow and carding a hand through Ciel’s hair, garnering a sigh which huffs out soft and damp onto his own skin. “I follow your lead. However I cannot help noticing when you act inconsistently.” 

“Notice, fine. But do not act _surprised_. I’m human, remember.” Ciel twines their legs, shifts closer and closer, like a bone fragment chipped off and attempting to re-adhere to the place from which it came. “You always remind me what a mess humanity is. I’m part of that mess, right?” He sighs deeply, tongue flicking out absently to the hollow of Sebastian’s throat. 

Sebastian rolls onto his back, pulling Ciel with him. He has grown a few inches this year but remains frail enough to rest upon Sebastian’s chest easily without hindering his breathing, rising and falling in time with it, head pillowed upon his sternum. Sebastian holds him there, palms spread under his bedclothes and upon the nightmare-stickiness of his lower back. Together, they are marooned at sea, a gull perched atop a bouy, the last survivor of a wreck clinging to a a piece of rubble. “I doubt you will ever stop astonishing me,” Sebastian says quietly, his voice echoing through their joined bodies. “It is somewhat regrettable. But I do not lie.” 

He feels Ciel smile, a hidden, secret twist of lips against his skin. He shivers. “You know,” Ciel says after a long stretch of a silence so close to death Sebastian wondered if he had fallen asleep. “When I was still a child, right after you saved me?” 

True to his word, Sebastian’s heart flutters again in surprise at Ciel’s easy, blasé use of the word _saved._ “Yes?” 

“And you’d take me to your room...not even _your_ room, but the room I assigned you, I doubt you ever thought of it as _your_ room,” he prattles, yawning, hand rising to twist absently in the silk of Sebastian’s hair. “You’d take me there and touch me all over, even when I was so young. And maybe you thought I didn’t know what was going on, but I did. Kind of.” 

He cranes his neck up awkwardly to look at Sebastian with narrowed, scouring eyes. “Did you know that I knew?” 

Sebastian gazes back, a hot, dual glimmer of red. “I don’t remember your knowledge, only your want. That was what mattered to me, then. And now,” he murmurs. 

Ciel’s eyes soften around the edges, bunched and tender with the rising tide of exhaustion. He seems satisfied with the answer, head drifting back down to Sebastian’s body, where it remains as he continues. “Anyway, I would be so excited and so scared because I knew it was going to feel wonderful, but I also knew it was going to hurt. See, those things were separate still, then. It was _both_ good and painful. But now, I don’t even remember what it felt like. To know the difference, I mean.” 

Sebastian chuckles low and thick, a sound which rumbles through both of them. “And that is how it should be. It’s a much more truthful way to exist, with those things unified. It’s much more beautiful.” 

“Hm. So you see beauty too,” Ciel sighs. It is not a question, but a quiet revelation. He smooths a hand up into Sebastian’s hair, then lets it fall into a caress down his cheek, as gentle as snowfall. “You’re not _just_ hungry.” 

“I am quite hungry, young master,” Sebastian says, hands inching over Ciel’s delicate shoulders, feeling the tempered musculature just beginning to harden and mature there. Then he palms back down to the swell of Ciel’s backside, soft and pale and his alone. “But hunger does not negate aesthetics. Why else would I enter into a such contract with you?” 

Ciel thinks fruitlessly for a moment, then states, “I don’t know.” His voice again comes out sleep-muffled against Sebastian’s skin, narrow hips shifting and stuttering almost imperceptibly as he’s touched. “I don’t care why you’re here, as long as you are.” 

Unlike Sebastian, Ciel does lie. He lies often and extravagantly, he lies as some men breathe, he lies as most children play. Sebastian can tell he is lying now. He might not have cared when Sebastian first found him, burnt the seal into his eye and swept him into his arms forevermore, but he has changed. He may have written a rule book, he may pretend to adhere to some deception of dignity, but now as he lies clutching and shipwrecked in the sea of their contract, he cares. Sebastian knows because he can feel it in his skin and taste it in his spit, because he needs Sebastian absolutely, he needs Sebastian to need him with the same haplessness, helplessness . And he would never say so, not with his mouth, but it is the truth which falls from him in every wordless cry, in every sound which Sebastian pulls from him. Upon the edge of the billiard table, Ciel’s favorite love seat, the floor of his study while the spring sings just outside the window. 

Sebastian thinks of hurting Ciel, but does not need to, for he is pleasuring him and they are evidently indistinguishable sensations to the Earl of the Phantomhive. “Well,” he says in favor of pain, fingers creeping towards hot crease bisecting Ciel’s backside. “Even if you don’t care why I’m here, I am. And I shall remain, until you receive everything you wish for.” 

Ciel yawns again, arching his back like a cat and fitting himself into Sebastian’s palms. “Do you know what I wish for now?” he murmurs, eye suddenly aflame, brilliant and stinging and blue and tattooed. Sebastian makes fists in his hair, and flips him onto his back beside him in the sheets, capsizing the rubble, sinking the buoy. He does know.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize so much for huge delay in updating! I'm sad to say that we're nearing the end to this piece, and the closer I get to the last bits, the most I struggle with editing. I have written what I originally perceived to be the end, but the more distance I have from this story, the more I feel…like its not finished? I don't know. Any thoughts from readers about how near to the beginning of the canon this feels would be appreciated. 
> 
> Thank you so much, again, to anyone whose reading this story, commenting on it, and leaving me kudos. It's on the third page of the Ciel/Sebastian tag when filtered and sorted by kudos, which feels amazing considering how huge this fandom is! Thank you all for making it possible. 
> 
> Here's a nice, long, appropriately disgusting chapter for you all as a symbol of my gratitude <3

Sebastian observes the Earl of Phantomhive grapple with his changing humanity, watches him realize in a series of tiny, tragic losses that he is not the exception to mankind’s wickedness, but the paragon of it. It is Sebastian’s understanding that humans view the world in contrasting opposites, in black and white, in binaries. And Sebastian knows that Ciel believes the rules of his colossal chess game dictate that it is he and Sebastian against the world. A little king combatting a universe of opponents, white hand tangled in the hair of his loyal, slaying knight. And in the end, he will triumph over all of humanity: humanity’s cruelty, humanity’s base inclination towards evil, somehow above it despite the blood dripping in rivulets from his palms.

Sometimes Sebastian wonders if Ciel believes that by existing in stark opposition to a world of wickedness, he is somehow exempt from its condition. That his cruelty is noble rather than animal, moral rather than selfish. Perhaps the ten year old Sebastian saved from death with damnation may have believed this, tucked into his vast bed awaiting nightmares, with nothing but the devil to soothe his aching loneliness, his profound loss. Perhaps. But the Earl of Phantomhive as he exists now, shaped by Sebastian’s hands and mouth and flesh, fired in the kiln of his desire, is well aware that his humanity is no different than that of the men who burnt his home, who murdered his parents. He knows what he is, and on most days, he does not care. 

Sebastian is pleased with his creation. He adores Ciel’s despair, his twined arrogance and self-deprecation, his resignation that there is no good and no evil, only hunger, and his pointed decision to use that hunger in order to win this game. He watches Ciel lie and cheat, he watches Ciel sit on his cards while he smiles the smile of the ingenue, the greatest lie of them all. He watches, and he salivates, and he waits. Most days Ciel knows he is watching, capable of bearing the weight of that gaze boring chasms into his back. Most days, he can look back into the inferno, lids lowered, lashes singed. 

Today is one of the rare days when he cannot. They are again in London, trailing an illegal arms dealer through the docklands, sweeping through the crowds and jostling shoulders with fishermen, sailors, loaders and builders. Sebastian is having a somewhat difficult time keeping up with the man they are attempting to follow without leaving Ciel behind, Ciel who keeps getting trampled upon and stuck behind crowds, like a bit of flotsam carried out to sea. Sebastian wishes he could just pick him up, tuck him under his arm and carry him through the cesspool of port-town filth, but he knows Ciel’s pride will not allow such a display in public.

As a result, they are nearly losing their mark. Sebastian keeps catching glimpses of his greasy, copper-colored curls surging in and out of the throngs of flesh, but there will be long stints of blindness in between. Finally, he stops, gripping Ciel’s arm. “Young master,” he says, fingertips cutting into a delicate elbow. Ciel’s eye flashes up at him, incredulous that he has _stopped_ , that he is not continuing to bully and bustle his way onward. 

“What are you doing?! He’s getting--”

“Young master. It is proving to be a challenge to keep both you and Mr. McLeary in my sight. Would it be possible for me to either carry you or--”

Ciel makes a disgusted noise, ripping his elbow from Sebastian’s grip, royal blue ribbon upon his top hat fluttering in the sea-breeze like a flag. “Absolutely not. Just leave me behind. If you catch him, find out who he’s working with, then kill him. If he doesn’t talk...kill him anyway.” He waves his black-gloved hand through the air dismissively, as if this man’s death is of no real significance to him or her Majesty’s orders. “I’ll get there eventually,” he says. “Go.” 

“Yes Master,” Sebastian says with a nod. And then he is off, whistling between the crowd, the docklands becoming a brown, briny blur of nothingness on either side of him. Ciel turns into a blot of dark somewhere in his wake, wavering and indistinct, smaller and smaller as he bears down upon their prey. He wonders, for a moment, if it is a wise gambit to leave him there. But because he has no choice in the matter, it is a trifling wonder. 

Eventually he finds McLeary hiding between two barrels of rotting offal in an alleyway behind a butcher shop, stinking of entrails and excrement, covering his mouth with a torn sleeve and breathing shallowly, noisily. It ends more quickly than expected. All it takes it a solitary crimson flash of Sebastian’s eyes before the truth comes spilling out of McLearey, several names in a deluge of tears and the stench of alcohol, scotch-lubricated truths and desperate pleas. He begs for mercy until Sebastian snaps his neck. 

The corpse slides heavy and limp to the ground, a slumped thing flanked in putrid viscera, and Sebastian decides the alleyway is not a pleasant place to stay any longer. Still, he hovers at the mouth of it for awhile, wondering if his young master will eventually arrive at the same the same dark corner of the docklands as he has, or if they were both placing too much faith in his ability to act independently. He waits, increasingly unsettled, a yawning vacancy seeming to grow in his chest. Ciel does not come. 

There have been times during past forays into the underworld when Ciel was cleaved from his side. There have been times he was put in enough danger that his pain and sorrow were shaped from the experience, his flavor richer and darker as a result. These times Sebastian looked on from a distance, removed but still ultimately in control. He has allowed Ciel to be hurt and fractured only enough it is no threat to his hold on him, it does not pry the talons from his throat, only softens the white of his skin so that Sebastian’s grip can sink deeper into soft flesh. 

Sebastian thinks this evening feels different. It is not a separation he is in control of, it is not one of many amusing manipulations of his own design. He does not know where Ciel is, what is befalling him. He cannot monitor his pain remotely, he cannot imbrue him in suffering only deep enough he sputters and chokes, but doesn’t drown. Sebastian thinks, for a moment, that perhaps his own arrogance has blinded him, and there is a limit to what Ciel can withstand without him. That perhaps he is capable of losing the thing he has worked so very hard to fashion that it feels inseparably _his_. 

As the sun threatens to set, growing heavy and orange against the horizon, Sebastian decides to start back towards the piers. A shadow amid shadows, he skitters through London in search of the Earl of Phantomhive, which proves to be quite a search indeed. Ciel is nowhere to be found, though Sebastian catches distant breaths of him, the smell of his sweat and his indigence, hanging in the sea air like a memory. He paces up and down the docks, increasingly furious that some sick and vulgar creature has potentially stolen his finest possession from him. Eyes far from human, the void inside Sebastian roils and swells. 

He twists through alleys and cobblestone roads choked with beggars and street dogs, imagining the various ways he will reclaim what is his. Blackness rages inside the cage of flesh he must wear, threatening to unfurl from his spine and tear the sea from the earth, dividing London from her ocean, parching the the city as he has been parched. His gaze casts a carmine glow upon whatever it falls over, and try as he might, he cannot change this.

An order is what brings him to Ciel, who he finds beaten and half-conscious several miles from the docklands, stripped of his fine jacket and shoes, resting against a damp and dirty wall and looking so tired it is worrisome. Sebastian drops to his knees before him, kissing away mud and grit from his brow, thumbing gently beneath the tender bruise hidden in his hair. “Took you long enough,” Ciel mumbles, gripping the labels of his waistcoat with bare bands, spitting a thick, pink-tinted mouthful of saliva onto the refuse-strewn cobblestone. “Did you find McLeary?” 

“He’s dead,” Sebastian answers, sliding his hands down Ciel’s calves, inspecting for further damage, any scrapes or bruises inflicted upon him during his absence. There are runs in his black stockings, and Sebastian worms a finger into one of them, grazing the delicate skin behind Ciel’s knee. 

“My hands are cold. They took my gloves,” Ciel grumbles, head rolling on the wall, smudges of muck on his cheeks making him seem older, gaunter. Sebastian imagines wiping them off later, licking the faint metallic sting from his soon-to-be-black eye. Ciel shivers in the oncoming night, and Sebastian tucks Ciel’s icy hands into the collar of his own shirt, against the burn of his skin. “I’m also dizzy,” Ciel announces, grimacing. “Two huge, dense clods hit me over the head with a bottle and carried me off. I woke up without you, and without my shoes. You’re lucky they did no worse to me.” 

“We are certainly both lucky,” Sebastian murmurs, shrugging his waistcoat off and gathering Ciel into it, rubbing some heat back to his shoulders before picking him up. “I doubt you managed to catch your captors names, but were they perhaps a Mr. O’connell and a Mr. Breckenridge? Those were the friends of the late John Mcleary, I discovered.” 

Ciel huffs, shaking his head. “These were just two common street thieves, looking for foolish nobility to mug. I would have shot them, but it would have drawn unnecessary attention to our chase.” 

Sebastian smiles. “Ah, was that why and how these despicable men managed to escape the great villainous noble, her majesty’s loyal watchdog?” 

Ciel glares at him, wind tattering his hair as Sebastian propels them up vertically through the night. They streak through the city and it pushes cold fingertips through their clothes, Ciel’s teeth chattering noisily as be burrows against the solidity of Sebastian’s shoulder. “Shut up. You were the one who abandoned me, allowing such a thing to happen,” he snaps. 

“Only after my young master ordered me to leave him,” Sebastian explains, pupils becoming thin and black and mired in hellfire, voice far sharper and more dangerous than he wants it to be. “I suggest you avoid such rash orders in the future.” 

Ciel studies him but does not say anything, eye narrowed, though it may only seem that way due to the swelling at his cheek, where his skin is puffy and shining and dappled in purple. He sighs, then eventually murmurs, “I’m older now, you know. You must...loosen your grip on me, Sebastian. Lest you appear suspiciously possessive for just a mere butler.” 

Sebastian’s eyes widen, mouth making a stern, flat line. “Perhaps,” he says eventually. 

They alight upon the roof of the townhouse, Sebastian standing there upon its spine, head tilted up towards the blanket of stars beginning to burn into the twilight above them, like so many festering wounds. Sebastian clutches Ciel to his chest, well aware of what it would feel like to lose him, the absolute emptiness which would ensue, the excruciating and depthless tunnel it would carve into his substance if he were to somehow be robbed of Ciel’s soul. 

It’s an unspeakable thing to imagine, so he says nothing of it, dropping to the stoop in a billow of ash and feathers, thinking of the cities he would destroy, the way he would bash the world to bits in the tireless rage of his grief. It is too much, surely. All of this, and any end to it, too much. 

He realizes, not for the first time, that hungering for the Earl of Phantomhive’s soul has shaped him into a fragment of his former self, a creature hanging its entire existence and meaning upon one, solitary meal and its preparation. He wonders, not for the first time, what will become of when when he has consummated this love. What will be left of him without Ciel to shape and twist and eventually, eventually, consume? What will be be once he has finally swallowed the paragon of human wickedness?

He carries the object of his every breath inside, lips buried in soft hair which smells like oil and wharf and blood. Ciel pushes him away as he carefully lets him down, and smiles the smile of the ingenue over his shoulder at his butler, the greatest lie of them all. 

\---

Once Sebastian bathes Ciel and properly tends to his wounds, he sinks to his knee before him, The Earl of Phantomhive backlit by the candlestick’s flicker as it rests upon the armoire in his bedroom. Sebastian buttons his sleeping gown for him, lips ghosting across each button as he tucks it into place. Ciel pets his hair like a dog as he does it, and Sebastian can sense that they are both feeling patronized by the other in this moment. There’s something peculiar happening in his mouth, a gathering tightness behind his teeth, and instinctual animal clenching of muscle. He keeps thinking about the skin he is obstructing, the softness of Ciel’s boyish stomach, the thin layer of fat laid upon the budding musculature beneath it, the white he wants so badly to splatter in blood. There’s a frustration building in his body, and meanwhile, Ciel pets him absently, gently, fingers pattering on the crown of his head like rain. 

“Did you worry about me while I was gone?” Ciel asks, plucking a thin black hair from Sebastian’s scalp and examining it between his index and forefinger for a moment before tucking it into his mouth and sucking. 

Sebastian gazes up at him, chewing on the inside of his cheek to keep from inflicting damage somewhere, tearing into that abdomen, latching onto the jut of his hip. Still, his teeth itch, his tongue lashes. He cannot stop wondering at the ache in his chest, residual pain from the mere _thought_ of Ciel’s soul being ripped from his teeth. “I was terribly concerned for your safety, yes,” he answers finally, finishing the last button and rising swiftly to his feet. 

Ciel’s arms fall to his sides. “Hm. That’s somewhat ironic, for you of all creatures to worry about my safety. Seeing as it is you who will eventually kill me, demon.” He says, pulling long, ebony the hair from his lips to scrutinize it again, its thin, spiraled self now beaded with spit. He sucks it back in, then swallows. Sebastian imagines it snagging along his throat, the tickling choke of it. The itch behind his incisors is nearly unbearable. 

He nods in response, inches away from Ciel, whose breath comes out warm and drowsy against his own stomach. He can feel the heat from the bath radiating from him, the clean, sterile scent of iodine and smelling salts, and is dissatisfied with all of it. He does not want the illusion, he wants the truth, he wants the searing burn of Ciel’s insides engulfing him, he wants the smell of his spit, his sweat, every crease and crack of human darkness upon him. He swallows a mouthful of saliva. “Yes. That is _why_ I was concerned...it is no one’s place but my own to take you. I feared for a moment that your death had been stolen from me,” he explains carefully, thinking that Ciel _knows_ this, knows it and does not care. That he has accepted his fate as the paragon of humanity’s wickedness. 

But as the words hang between them, something unrecognizable flickers across Ciel’s face. He flinches, hand rising to dust over one of his bruises, eyes suddenly clouded with a weary confusion. “Oh,” he might say, but it is so quiet it could be another word, or not a word at all, just small lost sound in the night. 

Sebastian reaches for his chin, tilting his face up so that he can look at him with eyes ignited.“Young master?” 

Ciel pulls his hand sharply from his jawline, gaze becoming fierce and hard and cold like the Thames frozen over, like every star above them, burning with the singular blue fire of things distant and untouchable. “You do not truly care about me at all,” he tells Sebastian, in a voice like nettles, in a voice like Revelation. “You are only here for my soul.”

Sebastian’s eyes widen, for he is caught off guard. Ciel is right, he is only here for his soul. Here for the glory of it, the terror of it, the beauty of it. Here for its perfection. Sebastian cannot imagine a more whole or consummate way of caring for something, but he is a demon, not a human, and so he does not see the world in contrasting opposites, in black and white, in binaries. He sees the world as he does, and there is no way for him to allow the Earl of Phamtomhive to gaze upon himself through a demon’s eye. “Young master, of course I am here for your soul. Please elaborate upon how--”

It is not the right thing to say. Ciel reaches up with a tiny, pale hand and swipes it through the air, teeth bared and cheeks blazing in the red of betrayal. Sebastian grabs his wrist before the open palm lands upon his face, gripping Ciel’s forearm with one hand and encircling his narrow back with the other, as if they are waltzing. Then he spins Ciel towards the wall, shifting his insubstantial weight with little effort, holding him off as if he is a tiny songbird attempting to spar with a crow. 

Ciel’s voice bursts forth from him like molten earth, torn and hurt and anguished. “You _said_ you _loved_ me, you say it all the time,” he spits out, and again, Sebastian is astonished. He thinks of what he knows of human love, the myth of sacrifice woven into it, lies upon lies. He shakes his head, the tightness in his jaw reaching an unbearable pinnacle, incisors lengthening into sinister points, eyes giving in to the sway of flame. 

He lets go of Ciel’s wrist in favor of his throat, and slams him against the wall in one swift, graceful motion. There beneath his palm he can feel it all: his fragile mortality, the stagger of choked breath, the whorls of cartilage in his voicebox, the thunder of his blood. Ciel fights against him, but it is like a seahorse fighting the whole of the sea, a moth fighting against an entire forest aflame. It is nothing to Sebastian, and he just tightens the fist he has on Ciel’s windpipe. 

“It’s just a bargain, you just want my soul,” Ciel sputters, spit bubbling in he corner of his mouth as he struggles to breath, fists raining down upon Sebastian’s chest, as useless as hail bouncing off the cracked and ancient earth of the desert. “You say you love me but you know _nothing_ of love.” 

The room is suddenly black with Sebastian, suffocating with outrage, the grotesque stretch of wings, the billowing surge charcoal rotting away from bone. The blackness pours down Ciel’s throat, runs its fingers through the smooth, slippery sacs of his intestines, expands in his ribs in place of breath and still, _still_ he fights the devil. It is so pointless, so hopeless; it is why Sebastian loves him. 

“What human vanity,” a horrible, alien voice snarls, snaking claws around Ciel’s tongue, ripping into the sweetness of his blood. “To claim you possess all the knowledge of love.” 

Amid the swirling eddies of flame-licked ebony, the shape of Ciel’s butler flickers back into place to push a thigh between narrow, shaking legs, splaying him against the wall like a fetal piglet pinned for dissection. “What is the difference, between desiring your soul above all else, and _loving you_? What are you, Lord Phantomhive, if not your soul?” 

Sebastian, half-body and half-not, releases Ciel’s throat, only to collect him in a mess of limbs as he collapses against his chest, a gale of fists and fury screaming hoarse, wordless fits into him. “I don’t _know,_ ” scrapes out of the storm, his lips raw and metallic as Sebastian bites and tears at them with wolf’s teeth, a forked tongue. “I don’t know, I don’t know. Yours,” Ciel admits amid dry and heaving sobs, crumpling messily to the floor, face pressed into Sebastian’s thighs, open mouthed and thrashing. “Yours.” 

With one black talon and one white glove, Sebastian pets Ciel like a dog, refusing to avoid the swollen bruise from where he was struck earlier this evening, insides writhing and dropping each time he presses into it and Ciel cries out. There are small, clumsy hands fumbling with the waistband of his trousers, and then soon after that the wet-hot drag of Ciel’s little tongue like a sliver of hell which has somehow escaped the underworld. It is mindless, hungry sucking, as if he needs the heat and flavor but does not care how he gets it, where his lips land. He rubs his face into Sebastian, inhaling the musky humidity there between his thighs, the coarse thatch of hair, his twitching flesh.

Forehead pressed to the wall, the length of Sebastian’s body bends like a reed in the wind, and he leans over Ciel, reaching down with trembling hands to gently guide himself into the slick hole of his mouth. Ciel makes fists in the hem of his waistcoat to anchor himself, slack and groaning as Sebastian uses him, graceless and fierce, filling and choking and rupturing until Ciel gags wretchedly, body convulsing and snapping against the wall like a death spasm. 

Sebastian pulls out, watching with eyes of fire as Ciel spits up thick mouthfuls of clear saliva streaked in dinner, eyes watering down his red cheeks, a terrible noise building in his throat as he clutches as it. In love and enslaved to hunger, Sebastian watches with inhuman eyes, he holds wonder in his inhuman heart. He smears a black talon through Ciel’s spit, using its slippery-wet to fist himself to finish into Ciel’s hair, a spiderweb of sticky pearl-white painting the Earl of Phantomhive a crown. Then, he tilts his head back, and gags him to uselessness with two white slicked fingers, as deep into the wet clutch of his throat as he can reach. It is like pulling his soul up through his mouth, hooking it round his fingers and snagging until it comes loose. 

Eventually Ciel retches onto the floor, bare knees sliding in the acidic puddle of his own vomit. Sebastian cleans his own fingers with his tongue, and watches his master. He is so small and wrecked and ruined, shaking between Sebastian’s thighs, but he holds his head high as he sucks in air, and even like this, he looks like a king. Somewhere amid the muddy splatter of vomit, Sebastian notices a solitary black feather, what has become of his swallowed hair, matted down in half digested food and frothy spit. He watches as Ciel fishes it out with trembling fingers, a string of spit still hanging from his swollen lips. He sets it down delicately on his bare thigh, and tries to breathe. It is only then, in the world which smells like Ciel’s insides, that the tension from Sebastian’s jaw finally subsides. 

Sebastian holds dark hair from his Ciel’s face, licking his own seed from the tangle in his fist. _What are you, if not your soul?_ He thinks as he pulls Ciel to stand by that fistful of hair, pushing his head back to expose the tender white line of throat and sucking the mess from sour lips. _And what am I, if not your soul?_


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. I don't know if this story ended up on rec list or something, but the last few days I've been getting so many lovely, heartfelt comments on it, even though it hasn't been updated in over a year. I'll respond to those soon, so hang tight, but in the meantime I decided that I should probably just post the ending I wrote for this a year ago, because the chance of me going back and revising it into something I like better is highly unlikely. I'm not entirely happy with it but I don't hate it, it's just that the feedback and love I got for this fic was so overwhelming that it felt wrong to end it on a note I was uncertain about. That being said, I haven't written in this fandom in awhile and have so many other unfinished stories that will inevitably take precedent over this one, which I HAVE technically finished. 
> 
> Thank you all so, so much for reading this story and loving it like you did. It was such a wild ride to write and I wish I hadn't burnt out on it, but I love this pairing a lot and still think about them often even if I'm not writing them, so don't be surprised if a sequel or a one shot in this universe pops up from me one day. In the meantime, I sincerely hope this ending feels like an ending, and that someone out there likes it. 
> 
> Thank you thank you!

Sebastian stands at the foot of the bed and casts a heavy shadow upon Ciel’s sleeping frame. His darkness spills like India ink into already muddy water, Ciel drowning beneath all of it, lungs full of black. He shudders in his sleep, still plagued with nightmares, still sick and broken and vulnerable as he sleeps, a silver pearl mired in the white oyster of his London townhouse bed with its expanse of feathered whiteness, like the memory of innocence, the memory of a child. There is a bile-crusted feather on his bedside table, a bit of Sebastian he has, perhaps subconsciously, saved. 

Sebastian holds up his hand and traces the shape of Ciel in the dark with a gloved index finger, half a smile twisting his lips up at the corner. He imagines the blood-spattered hallways Ciel is staggering through in his dreams, he imagines the wide blue eyes, still unmarred, still ten years old. He imagines it all, the thrill of Ciel waking to find himself sweat-damp and gasping, eye forever scarred, future a limited thing, cut short by the terminal snap of Sebastian’s teeth. 

He wonders if Ciel finds any comfort in this truth. He knows on some nights it is nothing but terror inspiring, to count down to his own death, his own consumption. But Sebastian suspects that more often than not, especially as Ciel grows older and increasingly world-weary, that it is a relief to know his end. To know Sebastian will protect him absolutely until that final moment, and then, there will be no surprise, no betrayal. Just a death like love. 

And who is to say that moment in and in itself is not some breed of protection? That Ciel’s murder, his destruction, is not in some manner of protection unto itself, seeing as Sebastian is willingly assuming his fragility into his own person, preventing him from experiencing any of the further agonies or ennuis of existence? After all, Ciel knows no other way to be alive. This is who he is, for better or for worse, in life, and eventually, in death. Sebastian inhales pointedly, smelling nightmare-sweat rich and tangy and pubescent, and wants to bend over Ciel’s prone body and lick it from all his creases, the backs of his knees, his underarms. He wants to suck him clean, baptize him, then swallow him whole. 

Ciel stirs awake, eyes flashing open so he illuminates the room in sickly violet, breath wild and rapid. There is an unspoken order on his parted lips, in his glowing eye. Sebastian steps towards him, mouth watering. “Young master,” he murmurs, alighting at the edge of the bed, terrible, sinister, cold, home. There when called for, there when not. 

Ciel regards him, swallowing wetly, face blanched and stricken in the dark. “What are you doing here?” He says, voice tinged in suspicion. “Were you watching me dream?” Then, his eyes narrowing and lips flattening into an accusatory line as he remembers their caustic spat from his evening. “You were lusting after my soul.” 

“Yes,” Sebastian admits, sitting at the edge of the mattress and carding a hand through Ciel’s hair, the stickiness snagging on his gloves. “Does that frighten you?” 

Ciel rolls over, away from Sebastian, shivering and wilting under his touch like it might kill him here, now, before they are both ready. “No,” he mumbles. Then, after a moment of consideration, “I don’t know.” He rubs absently at his neck with his palm, flopping down onto his back again and staring at the ceiling in defeat, casting it in the shining proof of his fate, his future, his end in teeth. “You do not frighten me. Death does not frighten me,” he explains, though he sounds somewhat uncertain. 

Sebastian sits in silence, wanting tug his gloves off with his teeth so he can spread his open and bare palms across Ciel’s still-heaving stomach, just as he used to under the guise of soothing him to sleep. He wants to feel the secret flicker and pulse of all his organs inside him, the proof of his life, proof of the thing he was gifted two years ago. “What, then, are you frightened of, young master?” 

Ciel inhales unevenly, fingers still grasping the slip of his own neck. “My throat’s sore,” he murmurs in a hoarse voice, changing the subject away from fear, away from the inevitability of their last scene together upon this earth. Sebastian does not mind. It will return again, each stream feeding the same river. Of course it will return again. “It’s your fault,” Ciel reminds him. 

“Are all punishments my fault? Or yours, for misbehaving in such a way to warrant punishment?” Sebastian asks. Ciel finally looks at him, casts him in the glow of their contract as he chews his lower lip anxiously, making it pink and swollen. Sebastian smiles at this small victory, imagining the taste of raw skin as he adds, “Regardless, I will prepare you some herbal tea with honey and lemon for your throat.” 

“Don’t go,” Ciel says sharply, reaching for Sebastian’s tailcoats as he rises, pulling him back down to the bed. “Not yet.” 

“Certainly,” Sebastian answers, forcing the cut of his smile to dormancy, encircling Ciel’s wrist in his fingers before setting it down upon his narrow child’s chest, over the speeding thrum of his heart. Then, Sebastian opens his own palm, and feels the terrified beat for himself, Ciel’s tiny hand doing little to quiet it. “Have you identified what it is you fear, exactly?” 

Ciel’s chest expands beneath his touch, then shudders to emptiness again. “I don’t know,” he repeats, shaking his head, scattering dark hair about his pillowcase like an slate halo. “I think I know that you love me, that lusting for my soul is the same as loving me. I’m not a child anymore, I don’t believe the story-book lies about love like Lizzy does. I don’t know if I believe in love at all.” Sebastian’s insides twist again as the lovely, pure arrogance of Ciel’s youth, proved by his denial of it. He smiles, nodding, urging Ciel to continue. “I am not frightened by your love. But sometimes, maybe. Of your hunger.” Ciel yawns around the last word, eyes heavy. 

Sebastian’s mouth begins watering again, his heart aching with the glory of what he has created. “My hunger? Is that different from my love?” 

“Yes,” Ciel explains, closing his eyes and thus condemning the room to blackness. Sebastian uses the dark to draw his nails across Ciel’s ribs, to make him squirm and twist and gasp quietly. “I don’t fear _you_ , but I fear that maybe one day, your hunger will overcome your love, and you’ll take my soul before the contract ends.” 

Sebastian raises his brows, and smiles wide and thin and alien in the night. “Unlike humans, demons adhere to their promises, young master.” 

Ciel opens his eyes and nods, squinting in the light of his own eye, cold and solitary. “I know. But earlier, tonight. You were inside me, I felt you. Felt your teeth. I thought it might be over, then, that you were going to take it.” 

Sebastian nods. “I was very close.” 

Ciel shivers, curls closer to Sebastian in spite of himself, a moth drawn ever closer to a flame which wishes to incinerate him, wings singed as he spirals to the ground. “I was ready to die, in some ways. But not in others. That’s how I knew I wasn’t afraid of dying...it was the thought of dying without retribution that frightened me, not death itself.” 

Silence hangs between them like something alive but only just, a body suspended in the moments just before the heart stutters to a stop. Moved, Sebastian bends at the waist to press a deliberate heavy kiss to Ciel’s brow. His tongue sweeps the tender skin there for the salt of his dried nightmare sweat, and then he pulls away, mouth stinging. “I will not let you die before you are ready. Furthermore, I will not kill you until you are ready. You will have your retribution.” 

Ciel swallows and stares hard at Sebastian, browns drawn together tight like a fist. Sebastian wants to reach for that tension with this thumb and smooth it away, but instead he takes Ciel’s one hand in both of his, and holds it until Ciel crumples, opens like a bud shorn from the rest of the bush, rotten before it can even bloom, crawling with aphids. “Alright,” he says, pulling Sebastian down on top of him. “Your hunger will not kill your love?” 

Sebastian smiles against Ciel’s pulse, licks into it, wants to tear it out, but knows he must wait, will wait, is waiting. “Young master, you must trust they are the same.” 

Ciel sighs, and Sebastian paints his sore throat in a garden of kisses, on his knees beside the bed.   
\---

He looks like he’s made from moonlight, cold and remote, a cream left out in the sun to curdle. He’s older now. Sebastian, who is waiting for the afternoon tea to steep, pauses to admire the span of his bones, the way his torso has lengthened and broadened, filling out the shoulders of his new dress shirts rather than straining the seams of his old ones. Though he has lost little softness around his stomach and cheeks, there is at least the promise of angles lying dormant beneath the surface. He is like a seafloor full of crevices and valleys, shaped by the ever-present whisper of waves. Sebastian wonders if The Earl of Phantomhive will survive long enough to grow into those angles, if he will witness the shape of the shore when the tide pulls back to reveal it, or if he will get what he wants before the chance to further examine what emerges from the sea. 

Sebastian pours Ciel a cup of ceylon in a flourish of steam tendrils. Through them, he watches his master, not yet thirteen but somehow a man, an ancient thing. Ciel stares back, cheek pressed into his fist. “You can be so _obvious_ , Sebastian,” he mutters, sounding bored. He takes the tea. 

“Obviously what, my lord?” Sebastian asks, moving to stand behind the desk chair, gloved hands gripping its back. His shadow falls over the strewn letters Ciel had been reading, like a warning for something to come. 

“Hungry,” Ciel sighs. Then he takes a sip of tea. 

Sebastian drags his hands up Ciel’s shoulders to his neck, where he stops to lock his fingers over the delicate slip of his throat, holding him there between yearning palms. He feels things bobbing and struggling, he feels blood pulsing beneath his fingers like the fruitless beat of clipped wings. He tightens his grip minimally, but Ciel does nothing, for he knows Sebastian will hurt and break and push and tear, but he will not kill. Not yet. 

_One day_ , Sebastian thinks, burying his face in Ciel’s hair and inhaling the nuance of the most glorious of gardens. This thing he has sown, this thing has grown, this thing he has grown to love, will kill, will reap. 

He imagines tearing into Ciel’s windpipe with a black talon, he imagines pressing his lips to the rupture and sucking in the oncoming rush of air. Instead, he uses his index fingers to tilt Ciel’s chin towards the ceiling, so that he can look down upon his round and upturned face, bathe in moonlight, dip his tongue down into curdled cream. 

The Earl of Phantomhive reaches up towards his damnation and threads a hand, warm from tea and porcelain, into Sebastian’s hair. There it stays. 

\----

the end


End file.
